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PEMROSE LORRY 

CAMP FIRE GIRL 


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PEMROSE LORRY: CAMP FIRE GIRL 






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Not a remote sign of a biplane deeorated the sky 
overhead. Frontispiece. See page 171 . 


PEMROSE LORRY 

CAMP FIRE GIRL 


BY 

ISABEL HORNIBROOK 


WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY 

NANA FRENCH BICKFORD 



BOSTON 

LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY 
1921 


Copyright^ 1921^ 

By Littlb, Brown, and Company. 


All rights reserved 
Published October, 1921 




1 : 


OCT 15 1921 


NoTtDoolJ ^rf«« 

Set up and electrotyped by J. S. Cushing Co, 
Norwood, Mass., U. S. A. 


0)C!.A627265 


^ r 


TO THE MEMORY OF MY MOTHER, VETERAN AUTHOR, 
WHO FIRST HAD AN ADMIRATION FOR THE 
WISE WOMAN WHO SAVED THE CITY, 

THIS STORY IS DEDICATED. 


/ 


PREFACE 


This, the first story written upon the 
latest and unique conquest of the age, the 
conquest of empty Space, with the subse- 
quent reaching out to the Heavenly Bodies, 
has the permission of the conquering in- 
ventor, Professor Robert H. Goddard. 

May it bring to every Camp Fire in 
America, and to boys as well, the romance 
of the transcendent achievement, beside 
which all dressing of fiction pales ! 

The Author also acknowledges her in- 
debtedness to Professor Frank G. Speck 
for permission to reprint the music of the 
Leaf Dance. 










CONTENTS 


CHAPTER 

I. 

A Quaker Gun 

PAGE 

1 

II. 

Gimcrack Ice .... 

20 

III. 

The Wrong Side of Her 



Dream 

31 

IV. 

The Second Wreck 

40 

V. 

She Saved a City . 

49 

VI. 

A Hotspur .... 

60 

VII. 

The Pinnacle .... 

69 

VIII. 

A Usurper .... 

78 

IX. 

Jack at a Pinch 

86 

X. 

Camp Fire Sisters . 

98 

XI. 

Mother Earth’s Romance 

109 

XII. 

Old Round-Top 

124 

XIII. 

Cobweb Weed 

134 

XIV. 

Stoutheart .... 

147 

XV. 

Airdrawn Aeroplanes . 

160 

XVI. 

The Council Fire . 

174 

XVII. 

A Novel Santa Claus . 

190 

XVIII. 

Reprisals .... 

207 

XIX. 

A Record Flight . . 

229 

XX. 

The Search .... 

244 

XXL 

The Man Killer . 

262 

XXII. 

A June Woman 

280 

XXIII. 

The Celestial Climax . 

296 









ILLUSTRATIONS 


Not a remote sign of a biplane decorated 

the sky overhead . . . Frontispiece 

“Oh! de-ar Mammy Moon — what a 

shock she ’ll get ” . . . . page 2 

“ Keep cool I Don’t stir ! I ’ll reach you 
in a moment!” ”86 




The man looked up at her, some dash of 
whimsical fire mastering weakness 


268 


PEMROSE LORRY 

CAMP FIRE GIRL 


CHAPTER I 
A Quaker Gun 

'^And will the Thunder Bird really lay 
its egg upon the moon ? Such a hard egg, 
too ! Will it — really — drop a pound 
weight of steel upon the head of the Man 
in the Moon ? . . . Oh ! de-ar Mammy 
Moon — what a shock she’ll get.”'' 

The girl, the fifteen-year-old Camp Fire 
Girl — all but sixteen now — to whom 
Mammy Moon had been the fairy foster- 
mother of her childhood, ever since she 
lay, wakeful, in her little cot, looking up 
at that silvery face of a burnt-out satellite, 
picturing it the gate of Heaven and her 
mother’s spirit as bathed in the soft, lunar 
radiance behind it, caught her breath 


2 


PEMROSE LORRY 


with a wild little gasp whose triumph was 
a sob upon the still laboratory air. 

“ Lay its egg in a nest of the moon ! A 
dead nest ! It will do more than that, 
little Pern!” Toandoah, the inventor, 
turned from fitting a number of tiny sky- 
rockets into the supply chamber of a larger 
one, — turned with that living coal of fire 
in his eye which only the inventor can know, 
and looked upon his daughter. “Yes, it 
will do more than that ! The Thunder 
Bird will lay its golden egg for us — if it 
drops its expiring one upon the moon. 
It will send us back the first record from 
space, the very first information as to what 
it may be that lies up — away up — a 
couple of hundred miles, or so, above us, 
in the outer edges of the earth’s atmosphere 
of which less is known at present than of 
the deepest soundings of the ocean. Our 
Thunder Bird will be the — first — ex- 
plorer.” 

The man’s eyes were dim now. For a 
moment he saw as in a prism the work of 



“Oh ! de-ar Mammy Moon — what a shock she’ll get.” 

Page 2. 











4 


PEMROSE- LORRY 


Mammy Moon ! . . . Oh ! Toandoah — 
oh ! Daddy-man — it ’s too much/’ 

Pemrose Lorry clasped her hands. Her 
blue-star eyes, blue at the moment as 
the tiny blossoms of the meadow star- 
grass for which some fairy has cap- 
tured a sky-beam, were suddenly wet. 

A slim, girlish figure in forest green 
— last sylvan word in Camp Fire uni- 
forms which she was trying on — she 
hung there, poised upon an inner pin- 
nacle, while sunbeams racing down 
the whitewash did obeisance before her, 
while spectroscope, lathe and delicate 
balances, brilliant reflectors, offered 
her a brazen crown. 

“Well — well, it’s coming to you. 
Pern — you sprite.” Her father shot 
a sidelong glance at the nixie green as 
he fitted another little rocket into its 
groove in the larger one’s interior, 
where the touch of a mechanical appli- 
ance, like the trigger of a gun, in the 
Thunder Bird’s tail, would ignite it in 


A QUAKER GUN 5 

flight. ‘‘You alone, girl as you are, know 
the full secret of the Thunder Bird, as 
you romantically call it, the principle 
on which I am working, child — in so 
far as you can understand it — in creat- 
ing this model rocket for experiments 
and the master sky-rocket, the full- 
fledged Thunder Bird, later, to soar 
even to the moon itself — Mars, too, 
maybe — you alone know and you have 
kept it dark. You Ve plugged like a 
boy at your elementary physics in high 
school, so’s to be able to understand and 
sympathize — you Ve lived up to the 
name I gave you — ” 

“My chowchow name !” interjected the 
girl, winking slily. 

“Well ! it is a mixture/’ Her father 
echoed her chuckle. “ But I guess you Ve 
been son and daughter both, you good 
little pal — you sprite of the lab.” 

“Oh ! Toandoah — oh ! Daddy-man — 
I ’m so glad.” 

Here there was a little laboratory 


6 


PEMROSE LORRY 


explosion, a rocket of feeling fired off, as 
the owner of that hybrid name. Pern- 
rose, came down from her pinnacle and, 
perching upon a low tool-chest at the 
inventor’s side, took the humbler place 
she loved, — fellow of her father’s heart. 

‘‘ I — I used to wish I was all boy until 
I became a Camp Fire Girl ; that bettered 
the betty element a little,” she confided, 
the spice of her mixed cognomen float- 
ing in her eye. 

It was a joke with her, that chowchow 
name — original mixture — and how she 
came by it. 

Her father. Professor Guy Noel Lorry, 
Fellow of Nevil University, — Toandoah, 
the inventor, she called him, — wear- 
ing his symbol, a saw-toothed triangle, 
embroidered with her own upon her cere- 
monial dress — had at one time almost 
prayed for a son, a boy who might 
help him to realize the dream, even 
then taking hold upon his heart, of con- 
quering not the air alone but space — 


A QUAKER GUN 


7 


zero space, in which it was thought 
nothing could travel — so that old Earth 
might reach out to her sister planets. 

He planned to call the boy Pemberton 
after his own father. 

Likewise the mother of the maiden in 
green now seated upon the tool-box had 
longed for a daughter and aspired to 
name her Rose, in tender memory of a 
dear college chum, a flower no longer 
blooming upon earth. 

And when the little black-haired mite 
in due time came, when she opened upon 
her father eyes blue as the empyrean he 
hoped to conquer, he had cried out of a 
core of transport lurking in the very heart 
of disappointment: ‘‘Oh! by Jove, I 
can’t quite give up my dream : let ’s name 
her Pemrose. If she had been a boy, 
I ’d have called her Pern.” 

The young mother blissfully agreed — 
and did not live long to call her any- 
thing. 

Grown to girlhood, the sprite of the 


8 


PEMROSE LORRY 


laboratory, who had looked through a 
spectroscope at seven, clapping her small 
hands over the fairy colors — pure red, 
orange, green, blue, violet, separated by 
little dark, thread-like lines, each repre- 
senting some element in that far-away 
upper air which her father hoped to 
master — preferred for herself the boy- 
ish Pern to the oft-worn Rose. 

But in order to square accounts with 
what she called the “betty” element in 
her, she evened things up on becoming 
a Camp Fire Girl by choosing a name 
all feminine wherewith to be known by 
the Council Fire. 

Wantaam, signifying Wisdom — a Wise 
Woman — was the title she bore as one 
who wore the Fire Maker’s bracelet upon 
her wrist and had pledged herself to tend 
as her fathers had tended and her fathers’ 
fathers since time began, that inner, 
mystic flame which has lit man’s way 
to progress from the moment when he 
forged a bludgeon to conquer his own 


9 


A QUAKER GUN 

world, until, to-day, when he was invent- 
ing a Bird to invade others. 

And it was that Wise Woman who 
spoke now; she, of all others, who knew 
the secret of the magic Thunder Bird ; 
and who, trustworthy to the core, had 
‘‘kept it dark.'’ 

“Oh! if I Ve ‘plugged’ hard in the 
past over those fierce first principles of 
mechanics, electricity, optics, heat and the 
rest — and those ‘grueling’ laws of gravi- 
tation — that ’s just nothing, a scantling 
compared to the way I’m going to study 
and make a hit when I get on into college,” 
she cried ; “so — so that, some day, I can, 
really, work with you, Toandoah — you 
record-breaking inventor — oh 1 dearest 
father ever was.” 

Laughingly, passionately she flung an 
arm around the neck of the man in the 
long, drab laboratory coat, half stran- 
gling him as he bent over the two- 
foot model rocket, testing it with his soul 
in his finger-tips, from its cone-shaped 


lO 


PEMROSE LORRY 


steel head to its steering compartment, 
thence to the supply chamber with all 
the little propelling rockets in it, down 
to its complicated nozzle, or tail. 

‘‘Why — why ! there ’s no know- 
ing what you and I may be doing yet, 
when we strain our wits to cracking, 
is there. Daddy-man?” she exulted 
further. “You say, yourself, that once 
space is conquered, that horribly cold 
old zero space outside the earth’s atmos- 
phere, anything devised that will move 
through it, as our Thunder Bird can do, 
then — then there ’s no limit ! We might 
be shooting a passenger off to the moon 
now, provided the Man in the Moon 
would shoot him back,” gayly, “if only 
the master sky-rocket, twelve times as 
large as this little model you ’re work- 
ing on for experiments, were ready. The 
re-al moon-going Thunder Bird ! Oh, 
dear!” Her little fingers restlessly inter- 
twined. “How — how I can har-rdly wait 
to throw the switch upon a mountain- 


A QUAKER GUN n 

top and — watch it tear, as the college 
boys say!” 

'‘Sometimes — sometimes I’m inclined 
to think it will never ‘tear’; that an- 
other than I will be the first to reach 
the heavenly bodies.” Toandoah sighed. 
“For where are the funds coming from, 
Pern, the little bonanza — fairy gold-mine 
— necessary to gorge our Thunder Bird 
for its record flight — fit it out for its 
novel migration to the moon, eh.?” The 
inventor clasped his hands behind his 
head, whistling ruefully. “Funds, child! 
Already, it has pecked through the biggest 
slice of mine !” 

“Ah ! but — ah ! but — ” the girl sud- 
denly flashed upon him a sky-blue wink — 
“ah! but the third nut hasn’t been 
cracked yet, remember, for the Bird to 
peck at that. Isn’t it in four weeks 
from now — oh ! in five — ” the slight 
figure swaying like the blue-eyed grass 
upon its tall green stem, blown by a wild 
breeze — “ in five weeks from now that 


12 


PEMROSE LORRY 


the third drawer will be opened, contain- 
ing the third and last installment of Mr. 
Hartley Graham’s queer, queer drawn-out 
will. When it is — oh ! when it is — 
maybe, then, at last, there will be some- 
thing coming to the University, our Uni- 
versity, to benefit your inventions. Daddy.” 

‘‘My child! when that third nut is 
cracked, ’twill only benefit a ‘nut’.” The 
man chuckled drily now. “In other 
words, the remainder of Friend Hartley’s 
fortune, all that his sister, Mrs. Gros- 
venor, hasn’t already got, will still be 
held in trust by me, as executor of the 
will, for — for that griffin of a younger 
brother of his who cleared out over twenty 
years ago and hasn’t sent a line to his 
family since.” 

“Was Mr. Treffrey Graham — really — 
such a — zany?” Pern asked the ques- 
tion for the nineteenth time, her black 
eyebrows arching. 

“My word! ‘Was he?’ A — a regu- 
lar hippogriff he was, child! A hot ta- 


A QUAKER GUN 13 

male, like that Mexican fruit which burns 
you if you bite into it! At college one 
could hardly come near him without 
getting scorched by his tricks. Remem- 
ber my telling you about my putting 
in an appearance in class one day — 
Physics 3 — boasting of the latest thing in 
student’s bags, setting it down beside me — 
and not seeing it again for three weeks ^ 
The terrible TrefT, of course I The climax 
came, as you know, when he locked a 
gray-haired professor into the padded cell 
for opposing baseball too early in the sea- 
son, while the campus was still soft.” 

‘‘Mer-rcy! And kept him there for 
ages — in that stuffy little room, all 
wadded and lined with brown burlap, 
used for analyzing sound — the prof not 
able to make himself heard !” 

The listener, girl-like, drew fresh excite- 
ment from a faded tale. 

‘‘Yes — that meant expulsion, of 
course, and his family, one and all, turn- 
ing a cold shoulder on Treff, before he 


PEMROSE LORRY 


14 

went away for good — nobody knew 
where. His engagement was broken off. 
His brother Hartley saw to that — married 
the girl himself.” 

‘H wonder — I wonder if the Terrible 
Treff ever married ?” Pern musingly 
nursed her chin, — and with it a wild- 
fire interest in the ^‘hot tamale.” 

heard he did. Somebody said so 
— somebody who met him out West, 
years ago — that he was a widower, with 
a little son. But — apparently — he has 
no more use for his family.” 

""No more — ^^no more than his sister, 
Mrs. Grosvenor, has for us since you 
were made executor of that outlandish 
will, left, piecemeal in three drawers, to 
be opened on the first three anniver- 
saries of Mr. Graham’s death — and not 
her husband!” Now it was an entirely 
new breeze of excitement, a stiffening, 
pinching draught, which swept the 
forest-green figure upon the tool-chest 
until its voice grew thin and sharp and 


A QUAKER GUN 15 

edged as the blades in the box beneath 
it. “Oh-h, yes ! she ’s at daggers dr-rawn 
with us now — on her high ropes all the 
time, as you’d say. And — and she 
sneers at your inventions, father 1 She 
calls the rocket, the rocket,” half-hysteri- 
cally, “the moon-reaching rocket, — a 
Quaker gun — a Quaker gun that ’ll never 
be fired, never go off — never hit any- 
thing ! . . . Oh-h !” 

With her hand to her green breast at 
the insult, the girl bounded, blindly as a 
ball, from her box, across the laboratory 
— and on to a low platform. 

Through her raging young body there 
shot like a physical cramp the knowledge 
that Quakers, noble-hearted Friends, did 
not use any guns ; that the mocking term 
was but a by-word, a jesting synonym 
for all that was impotent — non-existent 
in reason and power — a dummy. 

Savagely she applied her eye to the tall, 
ten-foot spectroscope rearing its brazen 
height from this low pedestal. 


i6 PEMROSE LORRY 

Without, beyond the glaring white- 
washed laboratory, was a February world, 
equally white, of zero ice and snow. 

Through the spectroscope she saw a 
world in flames — blood-red. 

It was not more flaming than her 
thoughts. 

Her father’s transcendent invention 
just a faddist’s dream ! The Thunder 
Bird a joke — a Quaker Gun ! 

“Bah!” Convulsively her little teeth 
bit into her lower lip as she adjusted the 
telescope portion of the instrument for 
analyzing light — reducing it to prismatic 
hues — a little. 

And now, lo 1 a world brilliantly jaun- 
diced — her orange — the snow being ' a 
wonderful reflector of the sun’s divided rays. 

“Father! Father-r! I used to love 
Una Grosvenor. Now I h-hate her ! 
If her mother made that hor-rid speech 
about a Quaker gun, she repeated it, be- 
fore all the boys and girls in our Drama 
Class, too ! If I see her this afternoon 


17 


A QUAKER GUN 

at the Ski Club, the skiing party out at 
Poplar Hill, I shan’t speak to her. And 
we used to be so chummy ! Why — ” 
the girl fluttered now, a green weather- 
cock, upon the two-foot platform — “ why, 
we used to stand side by side and measure 
eyelashes, to see which pair was going to 
be the longer. I ’ll wager mine are now!” 

With a veering laugh the weathercock 
was here bent forward, striving to catch 
some brazen glimpse of a winking profile 
in the polished brass of the spectroscope. 

Her father laughed : this was the Rose 
side of her — of his maiden of the patch- 
work name — the Rose side of her, and 
he loved it ! 

But — but Poplar Hill ! Poplar Hill ! 
Why I that ’s away outside the city 
line — out at Merryville,” he exclaimed, 
a minute later, in consternation. ‘‘Good- 
ness I child, you ’re not going off there 
to ski to-day — in a zero world, every- 
thing snowbound, no trolley cars running 
“Oh! the trains — the trains aren’t 


PEMROSE LORRY 


i8 

held up, father/’ The coaxing weather- 
cock now had a green arm around the 
neck of the man in the long, drab coat. 
‘‘ And I just couldn’t give up going ! I’m 
becoming such a daring ski-runner. Daddy- 
man ; you ’ll be proud of me when you 
see ! Why ! I can almost herring-bone 
uphill ; and I ’m getting the kick-turn 
‘down fine.’ Darting, gliding, stemming, 
jumping downhill — oh ! it ’s such per- 
fect fun, such creamy fun ; I ’m not a 
girl any longer, I ’m just a swallow.” 

“One swallow doesn’t make a summer; 
all this doesn’t change the weather.” The 
inventor glanced anxiously through a win- 
dow. 

“No, but it ’s such a very short train- 
run. Pouf! only six miles on the two 
o’clock express bound north, why — why 1 
the very train that you and I will be taking, 
later. Daddy-man, along in May, when 
you try out experiments with that little 
model rocket you ’re working on now, 
upon old Mount Greylock — highest 


19 


A QUAKER GUN 

mountain of the State. Oh-h ! if ever a 
girl’s thumb itched, mine does to press 
the little electric button and start it off, 
to fly up a couple of hundred miles, or so, 
to send you back your golden egg, siree 

— the first record from space. Oh ! 
through all the fun of slope and snow I ’ll 
be thinking of that the entire time to-day 

— the whole, enduring, livelong time. 
Yes !” 


CHAPTER II 
Gimcrack Ice 

She was thinking of it two hours later 

— having gained her coaxing point 

— seated in the well-nigh empty parlor 
car of the north-bound express, that green- 
aisled Pullman being the first car be- 
hind the cab and plodding engine which, 
regardless of schedule, crept along slowly 
and warily to-day upon ice-shod rails. 

But as she caressed the honorable thumb 

— the little girlish member which would 
press the button while all the world won- 
dered — and peered out through a window 
fairly frosted, lo ! again she saw a land^ 
scape dimly in flames — blood-red — as 
viewed through the spectroscope of her 
own raging thoughts. 

For ice was within the car, as without. 
There — there, seated almost on a 


GIMCRACK ICE 


21 


line with her, on the other side of the 
moss-green aisle, and only three other 
distant passengers in the compartment, 
was the girl whose caricaturing tongue 
had repeated the indelible insult about a 
Quaker gun ; whose mother considered 
her father a mere chuckle-headed dreamer, 
with his visions of bridging the absolute 
zero of space — just a mild three hundred 
degrees, or so, lower than the biting breath 
of Mother Earth at the present moment 
— and reaching worlds far away amid 
the starry scope. 

Pemrose had kept her word about not 
speaking. She just dropped one pointed 
little icicle in the shape of a nod upon 
her one-time friend as she sank into her 
own swivel chair and threw off the heavy 
coat with which she had covered her ski- 
runner’s silken wind-jacket and belted ski- 
ing costume of pure, creamy wool, with 
its full freedom of knickerbockers. 

^'There ’s Una — Una Grosvenor !” 
Her face frosted over at the thought. 


22 


PEMROSE LORRY 


‘‘Oh, mer-rcy! how I hate her — shall 
everlastingly hate her — for passing on 
that sneer about the Thunder Bird. 
. . . And I know-ow her eyelashes 
aren’t as long as mine now !” 

Mingled spice was in the furtive glance 
which Toandoah’s little pal, his maiden 
of the chowchow name, threw across the 
narrow train-aisle at the delicate young 
profile opposite, outlined against a crusted 
window. 

“And she still has that funny little 
near-sighted stand in one of her dark 
eyes, too — Una ! Although they ’re pretty 
eyes — I ’ll admit that !” mused the critic 
further. “Goodness ! won’t she open them 
one of these days when the world is all 
ringing with talk of Dad and his rocket: 
when the Thunder Bird, the finished, full- 
fledged Thunder Bird, undertakes its 
hundred-hour flight to the moon. . . . 
For, oh ! I know-ow that it will go, some 
day — some day.” The girl stared pas- 
sionately now into the future in the frost- 


GIMCRACK ICE 


23 


script of the pane near her. “Man would 
not let it fail, God could not let it fail 
— just for lack of funds — however that 
third nut may turn out — that third section 
of a queer will!’’ 

And now the mulled world outside 
changed again, shading from blood-red to 
fairy rose-color as seen through the spec- 
troscope of hope. 

She became lost in the most magnifi- 
cent dream that ever entranced a Camp 
Fire Girl yet — with any hope of fulfill- 
ment. 

Standing of a starless night upon a lofty 
mountain-top, she was looking up at 
Mammy Moon, dear, silver-footed Queen, 
so near to the heart of every Earth- 
daughter ! 

In the darkness she felt the eyes of the 
whole world upon her — she but a satellite 
reflecting her father’s light — its joint ear 
was bent to catch the wild, triumphal 
song-sob of her heart. 

And at the words: “Ready! Shoot!” 


24 


PEMROSE LORRY 


Toandoah’s battle-cry, she was pressing 
the electric button which, connected with 
a switch in the Thunder Bird’s tail, would 
start it off, pointed directly for the moon, 
to light up that silver disc with a bright 
powder-flash visible here on earth. 

She was mesmerized by its wild, red 
eye. She was watching it switch its rosy 
tail feathers, two hundred feet long, that 
dashing explorer, as, roaring, it leaped 
from its mountain platform at incredible 
speed for an incredible flight. 

She was echoing the college boys’ un- 
tamed slogan: “Watch it tear; oh! 
watch it tear — the fire-eater.” 

She .... 

But what — what was this.? Was she 
tearing with it.? Was she, she herself, 
just a shocked girl, at the heart of its 
rapid-fire explosions .? 

Was she being hurled with it through 
space, blank space. Absolute Zero, below 

what human instrument could register, 

or human girl encounter and live .? 


GIMCRACK ICE 


2S 

All she knew was that she was being 
flung, first, forward, then backward ; and 
then, oh, horrors ! against the train win- 
dow near her where glass was all splinter- 
ing and crashing, through which ice and 
water, mad, mad water and ice, were 
rushing together. 

There was an awful, punching jolt, a 
frenzied shriek of steam, a splashing, hiss- 
ing roar — that, surely, could not be the 
steel Thunder Bird’s challenge, unless it 
had suddenly become a wading goose — 
and, lo ! she was hurled straight out of 
her dream across a Pullman aisle, fast 
flooding, right into the girl with whom 
she had once vainly measured eyelashes, 
— between whom and herself had existed 
that thin bridge of ice but one little 
minute before. 

Alas ! poor human ice that couldn’t 
stand a moment under the blows of 
Nature’s ice-hammer. 

Both pairs of girlish lashes were stark 
with terror now. 


26 


PEMROSE LORRY 


^‘lina ! Una ! Una! Ac-ci-dent ! 
Tr-rain accident ! Gone through — 
through into — the — lake!” moaned 
Pemrose, half stunned, yet conscious, as 
she was ten seconds before, that they 
had been crossing frozen water. 

Water 1 A pale pond, now plainly 
seen through awful, swirling, wave- 
blocked window-gaps 1 Yet across its wan 
and shattering crust there shone a trail 
of fire, red fire, heart fire — vivid at that 
moment as the Thunder Bird’s pink tail 
feathers switching through the space of 
horror — and somewhere in that stretched 
consciousness which is beyond thinking, 
Toandoah’s daughter knew that it was 
the Camp Fire training in presence of 
mind. 

‘‘Una! M-mer-rcy! Una! Water’s 
r-rushing in-n — in so fast — through 
windows — doors ahead — m-may dr-rown 
right here, ’less we can f-fight it — get out,” 
was her struggling cry as, paddling des- 
perately like a little dog, she found herself 


GIMCRACK ICE 


27 


topping the flood, that lashing, interned 
lake-water, now blotting out window- 
frames on one side of the car — groping 
with icy fingers for the painted ceiling of 
the Pullman — then undulatingly sinking 
below them on the other. 

For it was a case just half-a-minute 
before, while Pern was still sanguinely 
loosing the Thunder Bird, of small pony- 
wheels on the big exprjsss engine striking 
a frog in the rails, an icy groove, and 
skidding, — then recklessly plunging down 
four feet, those runaway ponies, from the 
low bridge which they were crossing on 
to the ice, dragging the engine, the cab 
and the two front cars with them. 

^ And now — now — to the inventor’s 
daughter, the girl-mechanic, who had 
plugged so hard at her high school 
physics that she might understand her 
father’s work, came a thought that was 
worse, worse even than the hiss of the im- 
prisoned flood, tossing her like a cork : the 
engine might explode — the sneezing, sob- 


28 


PEMROSE LORRY 


bing engine, with the steam condensing 
in its boilers — wreck the car she was in 
— she and Una ! 

No ! She did not think of herself alone. 
All the frail girlish ice was a gimcrack 
now. 

But the terrors of the swamped car, 
that snuffling threat of steam ahead — 
a deep bass uz-z-z ! — momentarily made 
a gimcrack of other things too — of every- 
thing but the desperate instinct to get 
out — free, somehow. 

Calling upon Una to follow, she headed 
for a dripping window-gap, to seize the 
moment when the flood, now lower upon 
that side, might give her a chance to 
paddle through — scramble through — 
escape on to the cracking ice, before the 
opening was again blotted out. 

But together with the cruelty of glass- 
splinters, ice-spars scratching her set face, 
came the shock of an inner splinter : an 
inkling, somehow, that Una was help- 
less, could not follow, that, battered by 


GIMCRACK ICE 


29 


concussion, tossing like a log upon the 
flood’s breast, her senses had almost left 
her. 

Many waters cannot quench love — 
the love of a daughter for her genius- 
father. 

In that moment — that moment — 
there leaped up in the breast of Toandoah’s 
child the fire, the red fire, which alone 
can carry anything higher, be it rocket or 
girl’s heart. 

They had called her father’s invention 
a joke, a Quaker gun, Una and her mother. 

Ne'ver should they say that of his 
daughter’s pluck : that it was a dummy 
which would hit no mark, — or only to 
save itself ! 

^^Una!” Wildly she seized the other 
girl’s creamy flannels, buoyed like a great, 
pale water-lily upon the imprisoned lake- 
water. ‘‘Catch — c-catch me by the belt 
— Una ! I — I ’ll try-y to save you ! 
Oh-h ! s-stick ti-ight now.” 

And the daughter of the man, still 


30 


PEMROSE LORRY 


sitting afar in his quiet laboratory, fitting 
little powder charges into a model 
Thunder Bird, set herself to battle through 
the swirling gap of that half-covered win- 
dow-frame — clutched and hampered now 
— yet upholding, even if it was her daring 
death-thought, Toandoah’s honor in the 
flood. 


CHAPTER III 

The Wrong Side of Her Dream 

The ice had been thick-ribbed, prod- 
uct of a bitter winter, but it could not 
withstand the shock of a hundred and 
eighty tons of leaping locomotive — 
it splintered in all directions. 

Of the whole long train, however, only 
two cars and the cab had followed the 
engine’s plunge when those skidding pony 
wheels turned traitor, and were now ice- 
bound and flooded in the middle of a small 
lake, while the remainder of the fast ex- 
press, with one coach actually standing 
on its head, hanging pendent between 
the ice and the bridge, was not submerged. 

It was as if a steel bar were hurled 
violently at that solid ice, when one end 
only would pierce the crust and the re- 
mainder be left sticking, slanting, up. 

When Pemrose, a Camp Fire Girl of 


32 


PEMROSE LORRY 


America, greater at that moment than 
when her hand should loose the Thunder 
Bird, because she was determined that 
whatever might be said of her father’s 
invention, nobody should ever say that 
his daughter’s courage was a Quaker gun, 
paddled through the window-gap of that 
swamped Pullman, towing Una, she found 
herself in such a vortex of zero water and 
shattered ice that all the strength behind 
her gasping breath turned suddenly dummy. 

S-stick tight, Una ! Oh-h ! stick 
tight,” was the one little whiff that speech 
could get off before it froze — froze stiff 
behind her chattering teeth, in the pinched 
channel of her throat. 

And then — then — she was clinging to 
the jagged spur of an ice-cake, her left 
hand convulsively clutching Una’s flannels, 
while the eddies in the half-liberated water 
around them, spreading from a blue-cold 
center to a white ring, made horrid eyes 
— goggle-eyes — which stared at them. 

To Pern — little visionary — plunged 


WRONG SIDE OF HER DREAM 33 

from her dreams of pressing the magic 
button on a mountain-top, of watching 
the Thunder Bird tear, tear away moon- 
ward, switching its long tail of light, the 
whole thing seemed an illusion — the 
wrong side of her dream. 

It was as if she had soared with that 
monster rocket, Toandoah’s invention, 
outside the earth’s atmosphere, were being 
hurled about in the horrible vacuum of 
space, its unplumbed heart of cold, so far 

— so annihilatingly far below the balmy 
zero point of old Mother Earth on a 
February day when two light-hearted girls 
were going skiing. 

She was growing numb. 

In vain did her waterproof wind-jacket, 
the ski-runner’s belted jacket of thin and 
trusty silk, defend, like a faithful wing 

— a warm, conscious wing — the upper 
part of her body. 

The deadly water was encroaching, 
clasping her waist with an icy girdle, — 
stealing under it, even to her armpits. 


34 


PEMROSE LORRY 


And the petrifying little hand which 
had left its fistling in the train, — the 
thick mitten that should have grasped 
the balancing stick in all the wild swallow- 
fun of climbing, stemming, darting amid 
slope and snow upon a wintry hillside — 
could not hold on very long to the glacial 
spur. 

The ice-cake was threatening to slip 
away, to seesaw, turn turtle and waltz 
off, to the tune of blood-curdling sounds: 
screams for help here, there, everywhere, 
always with the background of that men- 
acing hiss of steam in the great engine’s 
boilers — that low, sneezing uz-z-z ! as if it 
were taking cold from its bath — the engine 
that, at any moment, might explode. 

Frantically she would have struck out, 
the little girl-mechanic, and fought the 
whole ice-pack to get away from that 
threat, to reach a solid crust, but she 
knew that she could not ^‘swim” two, 
herself and Una. 

Yet would they go under — one or both 


WRONG SIDE OF HER DREAM 35 


— perish in water not deep because of 
the starving cold, even if — if the 
engine . . . ? 

Her teeth snapped together upon the 
thought, its diddering horror. Surely, it 
was as bad a predicament as could be 
for a girl ! 

But, suddenly, through all the horripila- 
tion there seemed to shine a light. 

Somehow, Pern was conscious of it in 
the poor numb sheath of her own girlish 
being — and beyond. 

And she knew that her stark lips were 
praying : ^^Oh ! Lord — oh ! Father 
help me-e to hold on. Don’t let us — go — 
under ! I want — I want so-o to live to 
see Daddy’s rocket go off ! . . . He ...” 

The stiff sobs tumbled apart there, as 
it were. 

But the Light remained, the Presence, 
so near as it seemed to Pern at the mo- 
ment — even as she had felt it before 
upon a mountain-top, or at some match- 
less moment of beauty — that she almost 


PEMROSE LORRY 


36 

lisped confusedly: ‘‘Daddy in Heaven!’’ 
as once, a two-year-old, she had prattled 
it at her father’s knee. 

Then what — what ? Another voice 
prattling near her — chattering icily ! A 
bully human voice ! 

“Gosh! Something r-rotten in the 
State of Denmark,” it gasped. Jove ! 
I like excitement, but I’d rather be warm 
enough to enjoy it. Oh ! Dad, if there 
are any others left in that car, the one 
on end, you help ’em. I must attend to 
these girls.” 

“T-take her first — Una!” flickered 
Pern, a spicy flicker still, as she felt a strong 
grasp on her shoulder and looked up into 
the face of a broad-shouldered youth in 
a gray sweater ; the engine might explode, 
but, to the last, they should not say of 
Toandoah’s daughter that her courage was 
a Quaker gun. 

“Jove ! but you ’re game,” flashed the 
youth. “Well, keep up — hang on — 
I’ll be back in a minute !” 


WRONG SIDE OF HER DREAM 37 

The minute was three. 

He had to lift the second girlish victim 
almost bodily out of the water and drag 
her with him as he wriggled and crawled 
over the broken ice-pack, to reach a firm 
spot, where he picked her up and — with 
all the vigor of an athletic eighteen-year- 
old — carried her to the shore, now not 
more than twenty yards off. 

Humph! I was just in time, wasn’t 
IV he ejaculated on the transit. ‘‘By 
George 1 You Ve got pep, if ever a girl 
had — I ’ll wager you pulled your friend 
out of the parlor-car and held her up ! 
Some horripilation, eh.^” breezily. “Now 

— now what have you and I ever done 
that the Fates should wish this on to us 

— that ’s what I ’d like to know ?” 

It was what the daring little ski-runner, 
Pern, herself, had been vaguely wondering ; 
she liked this jolly wit-snapper who pre- 
ferred his excitement warm. 

“ Ha 1 ^there goes the engine exploding,” 
he gasped a moment later, as he set her 


38 PEMROSE LORRY 

down. “ Bursting inward ! Now, if it had 
done the mean thing, burst outward, pil- 
ing up the agony, doing a whole lot of 
damage, ’t would have been quicker about 
it. . . . Oh — you! Dad,’' to a gray- 
bearded man, with a gray traveling cap 
pulled down almost to his eyes. ‘‘Here, 
I ’ll hand over these girls to you now ! 
Will you look after them ? I ’d better 
go back.” 

Simultaneously there was a low, sullen 
roaring, the crack of doom, as condensed 
steam sucked in the heavy steel casing of 
the locomotive’s boilers and shattered it 
like an eggshell. 

In Pemrose it shattered something too. 

Wildly she looked into the eyes of the 
man in the tourist’s cap and was conscious 
that in one of them horror was frozen 
into a fixed stand, as it was in one of 
Una’s, as he helped her up a snowy bank. 

And, with that, her brain laid its last 
egg for the present, as the Thunder Bird 
would drop its expiring one upon the 


WRONG SIDE OF HER DREAM 39 


dead surface of the moon, in the knowledge 
that, the Fates notwithstanding, she was 
still alive — still alive, to see the great 
rocket go ! 

And as for its completion — as to the 
little gold mine necessary to gorge it for 
its record flight — why ! the third rich 
nut of which she had spoken a little while 
ago in her father’s laboratory, had not 
yet been cracked : the third mysterious 
drawer containing the third and last in- 
stallment of a dead man’s very strange 
will had not yet been opened. 


CHAPTER IV 
The Second Wreck 

That third nut was cracked just five 
weeks later in the firelit library of what 
had been Mr. Hartley Graham’s home 
— the home of a man who during his 
lifetime, so it was occasionally said, had 
been, in some ways, almost as eccentric 
^as his madcap brother — and concerning 
^the latter his college chums, those who 
knew him long ago, were of the opinion 
that he was a freak whose *'head grew be- 
neath his shoulder.” 

f The house, a white marble mansion on 
Opal Avenue, finest of the old residential 
streets in the University city of Clevedon, 
was now occupied by the sister of the 
two, the mother of Una, who had snapped 
her fingers at the Thunder Bird, calling 
it a joke, a dummy, a Quaker gun. 


THE SECOND WRECK 


41 


That jeering nickname still rankled in 
the breast of Pemrose, who looked more 
like a colorless March Primrose, owing 
to the lingering shock of that train wreck, 
upon the spring morning in early April 
when the family lawyer whose duty it 
was to settle the affairs of the man who had 
left three separate portions of his will in 
as many drawers, to be opened on three 
successive anniversaries of his death, drew 
forth the last. 

She was not the only pale girl present. 

By her side was Una, neighbor again in 
heart as in body, who laid one little agi- 
tated fist on Pern’s knee while prepara- 
tions for reading the will were being made, 
the two girls nestling together, as in 
chummy days, three years before, when in 
the peacock pride of thirteen they had 
conceitedly measured eyelashes. 

And the remorseful affection mirrored 
in that little near-sighted stand in one of 
Una’s pretty dark eyes was only typical 
of an entirely similar state of feeling in 


PEMROSE LORRY 


42 

the once scornful breasts of her father and 
mother. 

Mrs. Grosvenor was no longer ‘‘on her 
high ropes/’ as Pern had said in her father’s 
laboratory ; to-day she seemed to be, 
rather, on a snubbing-line which brought 
her up short now and again, even in the 
middle of a speech, when she looked at 
the inventor’s blue-eyed daughter, his 
trusty little pal — and that, sometimes, 
with spray in her eyes, too. 

Also, her glances in the direction of 
the inventor himself. Professor Lorry, with 
whose name the world was already be- 
ginning to ring, were appealing — not to 
say apologetic. 

She was quite sure now that any man 
who could turn out a daughter, not yet 
sixteen, to behave in a fearful emergency 
as Pern had done — without whom her 
own daughter would not be here to-day, 
as Una constantly kept repeating — could 
never forge a gun, be it rocket or rifle, 
that would hit no mark ! 


THE SECOND WRECK 


43 


She even expressed some agitated 
interest in the great invention, inquiring 
when the first experiments with the little 
model Thunder Bird, upon a mountain- 
top, were to take place. 

And as for her husband, he boldly de- 
clared himself deeply interested in the 
conquest of the upper air and space — 
so far beyond the goal which any aviator 
had dreamed of reaching yet. 

He even went so far as to say that he 
would be glad to see the remainder of a 
fortune, represented by that third section 
of a will, go for the furtherance of the 
professor’s wonderful moon-reaching, 
planet-reaching scheme, instead of being 
‘‘hung up” awaiting the return of the 
dead man’s younger brother who had 
been such a queer flimflam fellow in youth, 
— whose family did not even know whether 
he was dead or alive. 

And, at first, while the shell of that 
third nut was being solemnly cracked 
by the reading of opening sentences of 


PEMROSE LORRY 


44 

the will — oh ! how the heart of Pern- 
rose jumped, like a nut on a hot shovel 

— it did seem as if the kernel were going 
to be a rich one for the Thunder Bird, j 

For now, according to the testator’s 
wish, if his brother, TrefTrey Graham, 
had not yet returned to claim his por- 
tion of his elder brother’s wealth, then 
the money — a little bonanza, indeed, a 
solid fortune — was to be turned over, 
forthwith, to the University of his native 
city, to be used for developments in the 
science of the air — the upper air and 
what lay beyond it — chiefly for the 
furtherance of any inventions that might 
be put forward by the dead man’s trusted 
friend. Professor Lorry, 

It was here that two pale girls, abruptly 
transformed from April primroses to June 
roses — oh ! such pinkly blooming tea-roses 

— gave simultaneously a wild little shriek. 
It was here that Pern, dazzled, saw the 

Thunder Bird, with a clear sky, tear — 
tear away moonward — and noticed at 


THE SECOND WRECK 


45 

the same time, through some little loop- 
hole in the watch-tower of her excite- 
ment, the figure of a man with a gray 
tourist’s cap pulled down to his eyes, 
rather waveringly crossing the street with- 
out. 

He circled to avoid an April puddle, — she 
saw him clearly through the broad library 
window, at a distance of some fifty yards, 
beyond a flight of marble steps and a 
graveled entrance. 

A queer little shiver, a horrid little shiver 
— a snowflake in summer — drifted down 
her spine ! 

The figure had an icy background. 
She had seen it before amid the terrors of 
that February train-wreck. The boy who 
saved her, the boy with the jolly tongue 
in his head, humorous amid the '‘horri- 
pilation,” had addressed it as Dad. 

And then — then, she caught her 
breath sharply, as something blew upon 
her, hot and cold together — and came 
back to the library, to the present moment. 


46 PEMROSE LORRY 

For the gray-haired lawyer, with his 
mouth opening gravely, wide as a church 
door, with a little forward pounce of his 
body upon the typewritten sheets, the 
sheets that meant life or death — flight 
or stagnation — for the Thunder Bird, 
was beginning to read again. 

'‘Ah, but that’s not all, even yet!” 
he said. "This curious will has dragged 
its slow length over three years — and 
now we haven’t finished with it, quite. 
Here’s a codicil still to be read — its 
last word, written later, just two days 
before Mr. Graham’s death, so it seems.” 

Alack and alas ! that was the moment 
of the second wreck ; the moment for one 
jubilant girl of the dire breakdown, when 
the Victory Express to Clover Land, goal 
of blossoming success, crashed through 
into zero waters of blankest disappoint- 
ment, — almost as bitter as those in which 
she had held up her friend. 

For the last word of the strung-out 
will set forth that, whereas it seemed 


THE SECOND WRECK 47 

borne in upon Mr. Hartley Graham, with 
life drawing to a close, that he had not 
been quite fair to his madcap brother in 
youth, and that the latter would some 
day return, the disposal of his wealth in 
the other direction named — to the Uni- 
versity and for invention — should not 
come into effect for at least twelve years 
after the opening of that third drawer. 

“And so — and so, it ’s all hung up for 
another dozen years — unless Treffrey 
Graham comes back to claim the money ! 
Well ! I ’m sorry. Professor Lorry ; there ’s 
many a slip ’twixt cup and lip, said the 
lawyer, laying down the codicil with a 
blue look ; he was interested in invention, 
progressive invention he had never 
thought that the Thunder Bird was a 
Quaker gun. 

“And so it’s all hung up for the next 
twelve years,” was the baffled cry which 
went around the circle, with no single 
note of longing for the wanderer’s return. 

It would not have been very flattering 


48 


PEMROSE LORRY 


to the terrible Treff, if he was alive and 
present to hear, thought a gnashing Pern- 
rose : to the exile who had been such a 
hazing firebrand at college, burning out 
the fine flame of youth in the straw blaze 
of senseless pranks, — a griffin and shatter- 
pated jester.^ 


CHAPTER V 
She Saved a City 

^^And so — and so it’s all hung up for 
another twelve years — the Thunder 
Bird’s flight ! For I don’t suppose there ’s 
much chance of the money coming from 
another direction.” 

Pemrose Lorry echoed the cry, re- 
peated it desolately, hours later, stand- 
ing in her own room — a room that was 
a sort of sequel to herself, as every Camp 
Fire Girl’s nest should be. 

Her father had echoed it, as she sat 
very close to him, driving home in the 
Grosvenor’s limousine. 

‘‘Well! so far this strung-out will has 
been for us much cry and little wool, eh, 
girlie,” he muttered ; and for the first 
time she heard discouragement in his 


PEMROSE LORRY 


SO 

voice; perhaps he had ‘‘banked’’ upon 
that third nut more than he admitted. 

“So the money is hung up for the next 
dozen years, as far ’s any benefit to the 
invention is concerned,” he went on pres- 
ently, just before his own home was 
reached. “I ’d better be putting my time 
into something else, I guess,” with a raw 
scrape in the tones. “How — how about 
a machine for the manufacture of paper 
clothing, eh, or airdrawn rugs — ” sar- 
castically — “ prosperity, riches^ in that ! 
Ha ! Get thee behind me, Satan — but 
don’t push!” added the inventor whim- 
sically, thrusting his head out of the auto 
window, — with a sound that was neither 
laugh nor groan. 

“Get thee behind me, Satan — and don’t 
push !” 

Tears sprang to those blue eyes of Pern- 
rose now, as she recalled the half-piteous 
tone in the voice. 

Toandoah was discouraged. Toandoah 
was tempted — tempted to sacrifice the 


SHE SAVED A CITY 


51 

highest claim of his intellect, his original 
dream, or the dream whose originality he 
had made practical, of reaching the heav- 
enly bodies ; of being a pioneer in exploring 
the Universe outside his own earth and its 
enveloping atmosphere ; of finding out the 
secrets of that mysterious upper air, and 
where it ended, of getting back a record 
of it — the Thunder Bird’s golden egg, the 
first record from space. 

And the girl in her buoyant young heart 
of hearts felt that hope — nay, certainty 
— were still there, green, springing, as 
the first signs of happy springtime in the 
world outside. 

How — how was she to make him feel it ; 
she his little Wise Woman, his laboratory pal ? 

Her eye went to the emblems upon 
her wall : a pine tree on a poster, typical 
of strength, a banner with a sunburst, the 
sun shedding warmth upon the earth. 

And then — then! To the little squat 
figure of a woman, as the Indians de- 
picted her, with a torch in her hand, 


52 PEMROSE LORRY 

Wisdom’s torch — her own emblem as 
Wantaam of the Council Fire. 

But there was another representation 
of that Wantaam — that Wise Woman. 
Pern had designed it herself, painted it 
herself upon a two-foot poster, gaining 
thereby a green honor-bead for handi- 
craft. 

And before that the girl, wrestling with 
the heavy disappointment of that tanta- 
lizing will, brought up — her hands clasped. 

It was a curious scene : a lot of little 
tents with a wall around them, the same 
symbolic figure of the woman with the 
torch stood upon the wall, pointing a stiff 
arm at a man outside, a warrior, who 
had a knife in hand. 

Underneath were printed in flaming 
characters two Indian words: ‘‘Notick! 
Notick 1 ” signifying : “ Hear 1 Hear 1 ” 

“I always did feel fascinated by that 
Wise Woman who saved — a — city.” 
Pern looked adoringly at her handiwork. 
“A besieged Jewish city, away back in 


SHE SAVED A CITY 


S3 


King David’s time ! To be sure, one 
reads of it in — in what ’s a bloodthirsty 
chapter of the Old Testament ! And she 
saved the town by ordering the death of 
a rebel, a traitor, proclaiming that she, 
herself, was loyal and faithful to the 
king — so were her people — making 
Joab, David’s captain, that man with 
the knife, outside the wall, listen when 
she cried to him: ‘Hear! Hear!’ She 
had more sense than the men about her 
— and one is n’t told the least thing 
further about her, not even her name. 
That ’s what makes her mysterious — and 
fascinating. ... Yet she saved a city!” 

The girl drew a long breath — a sud- 
denly fired breath. 

Was it up to her now to save a city: 
the citadel of her father’s courage — of 
that rose-colored conviction which is half 
the battle on earth or in the air? How 
was she to do it ? 

Her eye went wandering around the 
room. Trained to the eloquence of sym- 


PEMROSE LORRY 


54 

bols, it lit on something. Just a sheen 
of pearls and a little loom upon a table — 
myriads of pearly beads, woven and un- 
woven, with here and there a ray of New 
Jerusalem colors, ruby, emerald, blazing 
through them — the New Jerusalem of 
hope. 

‘‘Ah-h!” 

Breathlessly she caught it up, that some- 
thing, four feet and a half of the beaded 
history of a girl, — pearl-woven prophecy, 
too ! 

Hugging it to her breast, that long 
leather strip, an inch and a half in width, 
on which her glowing young life-story 
was woven in pearls, with those rainbow 
flashes of color — the loom with it — she 
hurried out of the room. 

Never, perhaps, did a professor’s lab- 
oratory, the stern, hardware ^‘lab.” of 
a mechanical engineer, react to any- 
thing so fairy-like as when Pern, scurry- 
ing down a flight of stairs to the work- 
shop which her father had fitted up in 


SHE SAVED A CITY 


55 


his own house — not his University lab- 
oratory with the tall spectroscope — sat 
down to a table and began industriously 
to weave. 

Turning from a bench where he sat 
fiddling with a steel chamber, part of the 
anatomy of a fledgling Thunder Bird, of 
one of those small model rockets which 
he was fitting up for experiments on a 
mountain-top, the inventor watched her 
listlessly. 

Hullo ! What ’s the charm now, the 
thing of beauty ? That — that looks 
such stuff as dreams are made of.’’ 
Toandoah drew a long breath. 

^"No, it isn’t dream-stuff, father; it’s 
history, the history of your life and mine, 
all told in symbols, woven into a chain, 
a stole — see — to wear with my cere- 
monial dress. It — it ’s my masterpiece.” 
Pern looked up, all girl, all Rose, now. 

didn’t want to show it to you until 
it was finished. But now — now — don’t 
you want to see it ?” 


PEMROSE LORRY 


S6 

Listlessly, still, her father drew near, 
his tall figure in its long, drab laboratory 
coat looming like a shadow behind her 
shoulder. 

See there — there ’s where it begins 
with the Flag I was born under, the 
Stars and Stripes,” excitedly. ‘"And look,” 
softly, “that gold star stands for Mother 
who died when I was two. And there you 
are, Toandoah, with that queer Indian 
triangle having the teeth of a saw, the 
emblem of invention.” 

“What! That funny, squat figure, with 
something like a three-cornered fool’s-cap 
on my head and the moon above it, look- 
ing through a tube!” There was a laugh 
in the inventor’s throat now; the grim 
“Get thee behind me, Satan!” look, with 
the cloud of that codicil to a will, were 
melting away from him. “Well, go on! 
he encouraged smilingly. “Artistic, any- 
how ! I believe you Camp Fire Girls would 
weave magic around a clock pendulum.” 

“And here — here am I — Wantaam, 


SHE SAVED A CITY 


57 

a Wise Woman. There’s the Thunder 
Bird, see, the symbol of the great rocket. 
Here are you and I, Dad, upon a mountain- 
top, watching it tear — oh ! tear away.” 

He laughed again at the two stiff, 
woodeny figures, the comet-like streak 
of fire above them. 

'‘And this — the quill fluttering down 
attached to a kite ! Humph ! That 
stands for the Thunder Bird’s diary, I 
suppose, otherwise the golden egg — the 
little recording apparatus coming down on 
the wing of its black parachute.” 

The inventor laughed amusedly again, 
glancing sidelong at his masterpiece, the 
little five-inch openwork steel box, having 
in it two tiny wheels with paper wound, 
tapelike, on one and a pencil between 
them. This carried in the head of the 
Thunder Bird, big or little, would keep a 
record of as high as it went by the pencil 
automatically making marks so long as 
there was any air-pressure, like a guiding 
hand, to move it. 


PEMROSE LORRY 


S8 

‘‘Yes.” The weaver nodded. “And 
here — here is the Will being read!” 

The girlish voice was lower now, the 
girlish feet treading doubtful ground, as 
she pointed again to those two quaint, 
stubby figures, with a third one reading 
from a parchment. 

But there was no doubt at all in the 
young voice which presently gathered itself 
for a climax. 

“And see — see there — those little 
yellow dots I ’m weaving in now ; those 
are gold pieces, father, the money that 
is coming to us from somewhere for you 
to finish your invention. Yes ! and I ’m 
going on to weave in the moon, too, and 
the little blue powder-flash before her face, 
to show the Thunder Bird has got there. 
For it is going to get there, you know!” 
Pern’s blue-star eyes were dim now, but 
in them was the wisdom of babes — the 
wisdom oft hid from the wise and prudent. 

“Daddy-man!” She bowed her head 
over the pearl-woven prophecy, speak- 


SHE SAVED A CITY 


59 


ing very low. ‘‘I could always tell you 
my thoughts. Somehow, at that awful 
time of the train-wreck, when we were 
in the icy water, Una and I, before the 
boy came, the big boy who saved us, 
through — through all the ‘horripilation’, 
as he called it, I seemed to see a light; 
the — the Light of Light Eternal, as we 
sing — God — and I knew, oh-h ! I 
knew-ew, at the last, that we weren’t going 
to dr-rown. ... I know just as certainly 
now that you ’re going to launch the Thun- 
der Bird, to go-o where nothing — Earthly 
— has ever gone before. . . . Father-r!” 

Silence fell upon that passionate little 
cry in the dim workshop. 

Only the beauty of the pearl-woven 
thing upon the table spoke — the record 
to go down to posterity. 

Then into the silence tiptoed the voice 
of a man, whimsical, slightly, yet with 
a touch of tender awe in it, too : 

“And none knew the Wise Woman 
who saved the city !” 


CHAPTER VI 
A Hotspur 

‘'Oh! I’m so glad — just so glad I 
don’t know what to do with myself — 
that those experiments with the lesser 
Thunder Bird, the smaller sky-rocket, 
which won’t make the four-day trip to 
Mammy Moon, but will only fly up a 
couple of hundred miles, or so, and drop 
its golden egg, the diary, to tell you 
where that blank No Man’s Land of 
space begins will still be carried out 
this spring from the top of old Mount 
Greylock. If they had been given up, 
it would have broken my heart — so 
it would I” 

It was evening now, late evening, in 
the dining room of the professor’s home, 
looking upon the green University campus. 

The girl with the grafted Rose in her 


A HOTSPUR 


6i 


name, grafted on to a foreign stem, was 
pouring out her father’s after dinner 
coffee — and her own full heart, at the 
same time. ‘‘Ouch!” She shivered 
a little. “I don’t like to think of that 
‘diddering’ cold of empty space; not — 
not since the train-wreck. I ’m like the 
big boy who saved us then, and was so 
jolly ; I ’m out for excitement if I ’m 
warm enough to enjoy it, eh ?” 

‘‘ Humph I Well, here ’s somebody 
who ’s willing to take a chance on carry- 
ing his warmth, his fun too, with him 
into space.” 

The professor laughed as he drew a 
sheet of thick letter paper, broad and 
creamy, from his pocket. 

“Oh 1 is it somebody else .... you 
don’t mean to say it ’s another hotspur 
applying for a passage in the real Thun- 
der Bird when you start the big rocket 
off for the moon, eh V* 

The girl glanced over her father’s 
shoulder. 


62 


PEMROSE LORRY 


‘‘Yes, one more candidate for lunar 
honors ! And this one is the limit for 
a Quixote. Young, too, I should say!’’ 
Again Toandoah’s deep chant of laughter 
buoyed his daughter’s treble note, as he 
began to read : 

“ Professor G. Noel Lorry, 

Nevil University. 

My dear Sir, 

Having learned that you are perfecting an appa- 
ratus that will reach any height — even go as far as 
the moon — and that it will be capable of carrying 
a passenger, I should like to volunteer for the trip. 

I have always wanted to say ‘Hullo!’ to the Man 
in the Moon, on whose face I have often looked 
from an aeroplane already; and I am ready to try 
anything once — even if it should be once for all! 

Yours for the big chance, 

T. S. 

P. S. I respectfully apologize for not being able 
just at present to give my full name, but will, with 
your permission, furnish it later.” 

“Humph! Mr. T. S. ! ‘With your per- 
mission,’ where do you write from?” 
Pemrose bent low over the primrose sheet. 
“ Oh ! from Lightwood. Now, — now 
where is that. Daddy?” 


A HOTSPUR 


63 

There ’s a little, one-horse village of 
the name among the Berkshire Moun- 
tains, not far from fashionable Lenox/’ 
Her father smiled. 

“Lenox! How lovely! Why! that’s 
where you and I are going to stay — 
stay for a week or two — isn’t it, father, 
en route for Greylock and the experi- 
ments. You know the Grosvenors have 
invited us — and they have a wonderful 
old place up there. Una’s mother is 
carrying coals these days — ” Pemrose 
winked — “coals of penitence in her 
heart for ever having sneered at your in- 
vention, Daddy.” 

“Hot ones, are they.? Well! I wish 
she ’d hasten and spill them out before 
she reaches Lenox.” The inventor 
chuckled. “Let me see, she was born 
there, I believe, at their mountain home — 
yes, and one or other of her brothers, too.” 

“Ho! Was it — was it the unicorn; I 
— I mean the oddity ; the Thunder Bird’s 
rival for all-1 that money?” The girl- 


64 PEMROSE LORRY 

ish hand shook now as it wielded the coffee- 
pot. “Oh, dear! wouldn’t his horn be 
exalted if he never came back?” With a 
droll little catch of the breath. “Una and 
I are as friendly as ever now, Dad,” ran 
on the girlish voice, hurriedly leading off 
from the neighborhood of the will. “And 
she ’s to be taken out of school early, when 
we go, because she has been so nervous 
since the train-wreck. So chummy we 
are — oh, as chummy as in the old days 
when we measured eyelashes and she 
laughed at my ‘chowchow’ name!” The 
speaker here shot the bluest of glances 
through those twinkling lashes at their 
reflection in a neighboring teapot, older 
than Columbia herself. 

“Chowchow, indeed! It just suits you, 
that compound. There ’s a vain elf in 
you somewhere. Pern, that sleeps in the 
shadow of the Wise Woman.” 

“Maybe — maybe, there’s a nickum! 
That ’s Andrew’s word, Andrew’s word for 
an imp, a tomboy. He ’s the Grosvenors’ 


A HOTSPUR 


6S 

Scotch chauffeur, you know, who talks 
with a thistle under his tongue. Well ! 
nickum, or not!’’ the girl was a rosy 
weathercock again. "‘I — I’m just dying 
to get up to the mountains, to climb the 
Pinnacle, the green Pinnacle, that rough, 
pine-clad hill, with Una — and sit in the 
Devil’s Chair!” 

‘'What! My Wise Woman sitting in 
the Devil’s Chair ! Why ! ’t would take 
a daredevil nickum, indeed, to do that.” 

The inventor threw up his hands, laugh- 
ing again, as he beat a retreat to his hard- 
ware den, his laboratory, where there was 
ever a magnet, potent by night or day, to 
draw him back. 

Yet when still another six weeks had 
passed and Pemrose, with all the green 
world of spring in her heart, stood, breath- 
less, upon that Lenox pinnacle — a pine- 
clad mountainette some thirteen hundred 
feet above sea-level — lo and behold ! there 
was a nickum sitting coolly in the Devil’s 
Chair. 


66 


PEMROSE LORRY 


A brazen feat it was ! For that Lucifer s 
throne was a curved stone seat, a natural 
armchair, rudely carved out of the precipice 
rock, more than a dozen sheer feet beneath 
the crest where she stood with Una An- 
drew of the thistly tongue having driven the 
two girls up to the foot of the peak on this 
the third day after their arrival, with the 
May flies, amid the mountains. 

“A nickum — oh! a nickum, indeed — 
a daredevil nickum — sitting in the Devil’s 
Armchair, with his feet dangling down 
— down over the deep precipice! Look!” 

Pemrose pirouetted in excitement at the 
sight. 

“Yes, and, goodness! he seems to be 
enjoying it, too. Not turning a hair. 
Oh ! if ’t were I — I should be so-o dizzy.” 

With the more timid cry in her pulsing 
throat, and that little appalled stand, a 
star of mingled consternation and admira- 
tion beaming, bewitched, in one dark eye, 
Una turned from the spectacle — turned, 
shuddering, from the hundred-and-odd feet 


A HOTSPUR 67 

of unbroken abyss extending from the 
nickum's knickerbockered legs, non- 
chalantly swinging, to an awed grove of 
young pine trees, rock-ribbed and bowlder- 
strewn, far below. 

‘‘Oh! I don’t want to look at him,” 
she cried cravenly. “ How will he — ever 
— climb back up here again ?” 

“Tr-rust him — ” began Toandoah’s 
daughter, then suddenly clutched her throat, 
her widening eyes as round, as bright, as 
staringly blue as the mountain lupine al- 
ready opening upon the world’s surprises, 
in sunny spots, among the hills. 

Those eyes were now fastened to the 
back of the nickum’s close-cropped head, 
to his broad shoulders in a rough, gray 
sweater, noting a certain “bully” shrug 
of those shoulders at the surrounding 
landscape, as if, monarch of all he sur- 
veyed, he yet felt himself a usurper in his 
present seat. 

“ Something rotten — something rotten 
in the State of Denmark 1 ” crowed Pemrose 


68 


PEMROSE LORRY 


softly. “ I wonder if he ’s getting that off 
now? Una! Una! It’s He . . . He!” 
‘‘Who? Who?” 

“The man — ^the boy — who saved us 
after the train-wreck . . . without whom 
we mightn’t be here — now ! Ah-h !” was 
the softly tremulous answer, as the blue 
eyes danced down the rock, with frankest 
recognition, friendliest expectation, to that 
daring, nonchalant nickum figure, now 
coolly drawing up its toes for a climb. 


CHAPTER VII 
The Pinnacle 

It was an exciting situation. 

Pemrose, who like the enthroned daredevil 
liked excitement, if she was warm enough 
to enjoy it, had not hoped for quite such a 
tidbit when she came to the mountains, — 
at least, short of the little Thunder Bird’s 
record-breaking flight. 

‘‘Oh! I did so want to run across him 
again. I do so long to thank him ! Why 
— why! we might never have escaped 
from that awful wreck, got out of the zero 
water, but for him, Una.” The blue eyes 
were wet now, frankly wet, bluebells by 
a mountain brook — the little bursting 
brooklet of feeling within. 

— I’d like to thank him, tool” 
gushed Una, with that little fixed star 


PEMROSE LORRY 


70 

twinkling most radiantly in one dark eye, 
the slight stand which characterized it 
only at intense moments when feeling 
reached indefinite altitudes. ^‘Oh! how 
glad I am now,’’ she ran on breathlessly, 
''that we made Andrew leave the car down 
in a garage at the Pinnacle’s foot and bring 
us up here for a sort of picnic supper,” 
sending a sidelong glance scouting round 
for the tall, capped figure of the grizzled 
chauffeur who, a brief ten years before, 
had been driving his "laird’s” car upon 
Ben Muir, a heathery mountain of his 
native Highlands. 

Trustworthy as day, a capable driver 
and zealous Church Elder, he was one 
to whose guardianship Una Grosvenor, 
the apple of her parents’ eye, might safely 
be intrusted with her visiting friend while 
her father golfed and her mother lunched 
and played bridge in complacent peace 
of mind. 

"Oh! she’s all right with Andrew; 
he ’s such a true-penny I” was her father’s 


THE PINNACLE 


71 


dictum. “Safer with him, up here, than 
she would be with maid or housekeeper ! 
And, after that shock in the winter, the 
doctor wants her to be out of doors among 
the hills morning, noon and night — prac- 
tically all the time, if she can 

Ah ! so far, so good. But just at this 
unprecedented moment of excitement 
Andrew, the true-penny, had encountered 
another Scot, who emigrated before he 
did, and was breezily “clacking’’ with 
him at some distance from where two 
breathlessly expectant girls gazed down 
upon the black top of the nickum’s 
head — and at his wheeling shoulders in 
the great armchair. 

“Oh — oh! there he goes — see — 
curling up his legs, drawing up his feet 
carefully, turning in the seat — standing 
up!” cried Pemrose, all Rose at this 
crisis, prematurely blooming, as if it were 
June, not May, as she stood on tiptoe to 
meet a dramatic moment, reveling in the 
thought that the daredevil did not know 


72 


PEMROSE LORRY 


what a surprise awaited him on top here, 
what a welcome — heart-eager gratitude. 

She bit her lip, however, upon the im- 
pulsive cry, for she saw two girls, younger 
than herself, with a ten-year-old boy, who 
had been watching the climber’s feat from 
a near-by mound, turn and look at her 
curiously. 

They were evidently acquainted with 
the daring usurper of the Devil’s Chair. 

For, having drawn up his legs until 
his knees touched his chin, then raised 
himself to a standing position on the 
grim stone seat, cautiously turning, his 
strong fingers gripping the granite chair- 
arms, when his back was to the preci- 
pice beneath and his face almost touching 
the twelve-foot, well-nigh perpendicular 
rock which he had to climb, he actually 
had the hardihood to wave his hand to 
them. 

‘‘Now — now comes the ‘scratch’!” he 
shouted laughingly. “ I ’m going to hook 
on to that ‘nick’ in the rock, there, just 


THE PINNACLE 


73 


over my head, and draw myself up. Had 
to ‘shy’ it coming down — for fear it 
would catch in my clothing.” 

“Didn’t I — didn’t I t-tell you it 
was him?” burst forth Pern, with all 
the vehemence of a little spring torrent, in 
Una’s ear as she caught the ring of the 
chaffing voice which had railed at the 
Fates for “wishing a wreck on” to un- 
offending youth, and was so boldly chal- 
lenging them now. 

And just as free and frank in her girlish 
gratitude as that torrent bubbling im- 
pulsively out of the earth, when the nickum 
reached the crest again, she sprang for- 
ward, hand outstretched, to meet him. 
Her eyes, blue as the little fairy blossoms 
of the star-grass now, were breeze blown 
in the meadow of her gladness. 

It was nothing — nothing not to know 
the name of one who had saved you from 
death, she thought. 

By the rescue you knew him ! 

And he knew her ! 


74 


PEMROSE LORRY 


Those eyes, those keen, girlish eyes 
which had looked through the spectro- 
scope a hundred times, in her father’s 
laboratory, into the remote mystery of 
that far-away upper air could not be 
deceived. 

By the sudden, startled heave of his 
shoulders, whose defiant shrug she re- 
membered so well, by the quick intake 
of breath, as its climbing hiss sharpened 
to a whistle — almost a rude whistle in 
the excitement of the feat he had just 
performed — by the little stare of breath- 
less surprise, of quandary, in his dark eyes, 
glowing like Una’s, he recognized her . . . 
and passed her by. 

Recognized her as the girl whose ^‘pep” 
he had complimented for putting another’s 
life before her own — and didn’t want 
to have anything more in life to say to her ! 

Well ! the Heavens fell upon the Pin- 
nacle as Pern drew back — annihilated. 

Snubbed for the first time in all her 
blue-sky life — and by a boy, too ! 


THE PINNACLE 


75 

To be sure, indeed, the nickum, his 
glance darting past her to Una, had gone 
by with a slight inclination of his bare 
head that was a stony bow. 

To be sure, when one of the girls of his 
acquaintance questioned him about the 
view from the Devil’s Seat, there was a 
sort of creak in his voice as he answered: 

It ’s — a — corker ! You can see 
away off: far-rms, lakes, all the other 
mountains — Mount Greylock, too, in the 
distance ! But — but it’s a cat’s-foot climb 
down — there!” breaking off breathlessly, 
as if feeling were making a caPs-paw of 
him. 

^'Oh! you can really see Mount Grey- 
lock ! As far away as that ! Well I I ’m 
going to try-y it, too,” ventured one of 
his girlish companions whose age was 
fourteen. ^‘Summer and winter, I ’ve done 
a lot of climbing, up here !” 

^‘You try it I Any girl try sitting in 
the Devil’s Chair ! Why ! there isn’t a 
girl living who could do it,” crowed the 


PEMROSE LORRY 


76 

gray-shouldered youth : and now his tones 
were lordly, as if he were picking himself 
up after an inner tumble. 

“Hey! Is that so?” Pern — over- 
hearing — ground the words between her 
teeth. 

“ Have you never heard of Camp Fire, 

What a shame 1 What a shame 1 
If you Ve never heard of Camp Fire, 

You ’re to blame 1 You ’re to blame 1 
Then don’t take a nap. 

For we ’re on the map. 

Ready to prove it with s-snap 1 ” 

She hissed the last word at the nickum’s 
back, as he halted at some distance with 
his companions. 

“Una ! I ’m going to do it,” she panted. 
“I ’m going to slide down that rock there, 
turn round and sit in the Chair — then 
draw myself up again, as he did. I Ve 
got on sneakers. I know I can ! I Ve 
done some breakneck climbing with father 
— yes ! and with my Camp Fire Group, 
too.” 


THE PINNACLE 


77 

— I ’ll give you all my marshmallows 
that we brought with us to toast at an 
open fire, if you do ! , . . Yes ! and 
one of my two little thistle pins — pebble 
pins — that Andrew and his wife brought 
me from Scotland, when they went home 
last year, if you do. , Wasn’t he 
just hor-rid ? He didn’t want to speak 
to us — to know us !” 

Una’s face flamed upon the bribe, and 
was so pretty lit by that fixed star in the 
eye, that it must have been a zero-hearted 
nickum who could turn his back upon it. 

^‘Hold my hat,” said Pern: if she had 
been a boy, the tone would have meant: 
^‘Hold my coat while I thrash him!” 

Unhesitatingly she stepped to the preci- 
pice-brink and measured the distance to 
that Devil’s Chair very coolly and critically 
with her eye. 


CHAPTER VIII 
A Usurper 

Gathering her short, green skirt about 
her, for she wore, as on that February 
day in her father’s laboratory, what he 
called the “ nixie green ”, the sylvan Camp 
Fire uniform, the inventor’s daughter 
stretched herself breast downward, upon 
the flat ledge of the Pinnacle’s crest. 

Working her body carefully backward, 
without another glance at the precipice 
beneath, she slid warily over the edge, 
her face to the rock, and down the dozen 
feet of almost smooth, nearly perpendic- 
ular slab, until her feet touched the stone 
seat of that curved armchair, a deep 
embrasure in the mountain granite. 

It was not such a wildly difficult feat 
then for a girl on her mettle to turn cau- 


A USURPER 


79 


tiously until her tingling back was pressed 
hard against the slab, and thus to lower 
herself to a sitting position on the rocky 
throne. 

For that Devil’s Chair was a spacious 
one — fairly so ! The seat extended out- 
ward at least three feet and was roomy 
enough to allow of two people standing 
upright on it at the same time. 

And what a view old Lucifer must have 
from it, was Pern’s first thought — pro- 
vided he didn’t, as an Irishman would 
say, reside away from home ! 

Off to the right and left stretched the 
wonderful landscape of the Berkshire Hills, 
Massachusetts’ Highlands — the Berkshire 
mountains in May where, afar, a summit 
snow-cap vied with the driven snows of 
blossoming fruit trees, lower down ; where 
the pink-shot pearl of a lake gleamed, 
opal-like, from an emerald setting, and 
many a silver thread winding, expanding, 
showed where some madcap river or brook 
had become with spring a wild thing. 


8o PEMROSE LORRY 

‘‘Oh, hurrah! I can really see off to 
Mount Greylock — old King Greylock — 
even the steel tower upon it — oh ! so 
plainly,’’ murmured the madcap in the 
Chair, and nestled triumphantly against 
its rocky back. 

‘‘Greylock, cloud-girdled, from his purple 
throne, 

A shout of gladness sends. 

And up soft meadow slopes, a warbling tone. 
Of Housatonic blends.’’ 

Yes 1 she felt as if they were two throned 
dignitaries, she and Greylock ; for she 
wore the crown of derring do, and King 
Greylock, still wearing a thin diadem of 
snow, was enthroned for ever in her imag- 
ination as the favored peak from which 
the first experiments with her father’s 
immortal rocket were to be made. 

Upon Greylock’s crest within a week 
or two, maybe — at all events before sum- 
mer dog-day heat clogged and fogged the 
air — her transcendent dream — or the first 
part of it — would come to pass : her 
yearning thumb would press the button 


A USURPER 


8i 


and start the little Thunder Bird off, to 
fly up a couple of hundred miles, or so, 
with its diary in its cone-shaped head, 
and send back that novel explorer’s log, 
the little recording apparatus, attached 
to a black silk parachute — the first, the 
very first record from the outer realm of 
space. 

No wonder that old Greylock sent her 
back a shout of gladness now, as, squirm- 
ing in the Chair, she turned her gaze 
away from the distant mountain to green 
meadow slopes, to the right, where the 
broadest silver ribbon, intertwined with 
the matchless landscape, showed where 
the Housatonic River, the blue Housa- 
tonic, flowed and sang. 

^‘Oh, dear! I wouldn’t have missed 
this for anything,” she exulted silently. 
‘‘But the idea of that perfectly horrid 
boy actually daring me to do it I He 
didn’t mean to, but he did — strutting 
off, like that, crowing about his climbing I 
As if a girl were — gingerbread I Well — ” 


82 PEMROSE LORRY 

indignantly — ‘‘that was just one with 
his passing Una and me when we only 
wanted to thank him, felt as if we naturally 
must thank him, for — for. . . . Bah ! 
I won’t think of the horrid wreck now! 
Or of him, either ! I ’ll be taken up with 
the view ! Is n’t it exquisite — sublime ? 
Not interrupted as it is up there on the 

— Pinnacle’s — crest ! . . . — Ah-h I” 

The little pinched exclamation came when 

— all too suddenly — she changed the point 
of view, and looked down. 

Beneath her yawned the precipice over 
which her feet dangled — treading air, with 
never a break between them and that grove 
of dwarf pine trees more than a hundred 
feet below, pointed by their glinting rocks. 

The little trees bowed to her, now, like 
servants — green pages. 

But, somehow, their homage made her 
feel uneasy; it put too great a distance 
beneath her and them. 

The crown of daring which she wore 
did not fit quite so easily. 


A USURPER 


83 

She began to feel like a usurper whose 
head might at any moment be taken off. 

And, with that, she decided to vacate ! 

Drawing up her feet much more grace- 
fully than her predecessor had done, she 
curled her body in the seat and raised it 
slowly until she was in a standing posi- 
tion, grasping the stone arms of the chair, 
turned — turned rather sickeriingly, to be 
sure, until her breast was against the 
broad rock down which she had slid, 
then reached upward for a handhold by 
which to climb — to draw herself up. 

There was one. The nickum — churl- 
ish climber — had pulled himself up by 
it. Like him, she had fought shy of it, 
sliding down, for fear it should catch in 
her clothing. 

A little spur it was, projecting from a 
slight fissure, what he called a ‘‘nick,’’ in the 
rock, rather more than half-way up, — a 
good seven feet from the rocky armchair. 

Breathlessly she reached upward, to 
grasp it. 


84 PEMROSE LORRY 

And, lo ! her lips fell apart — like a 
cleft stone. 

At the same time her heart slunk out of 
her body and dropped into the precipice 
behind her. 

Her fingers just missed that spur — 
fell short ! 

They touched it; they could not curl 
over it — and grip. 

Flattening herself to a green creeper 
against the rock which seemed spurning 
her, wildly she stretched every tendril — 
every sinew. 

In vain! Make as long an arm as she 
could, this daring Pern, her five feet three 
of slim girlish stature would not become 
the five feet nine of the daredevil who 
preceded her 1 

Emergency balks at extension. 

That right arm, racked, fell limply back. 

The blue of her eyes, hooking to the 
spur, if her fingers couldn’t, grew glazed 
like enamel. 

She felt as if she were tumbling back- 


A USURPER 8s 

ward already, the daring essence of her, 
to break her too spunky backbone among 
those glowing pine-dwarfs far beneath. 

Spread-eagled against the rock’s cruel 
breast, she turned a blanched face, a con- 
vulsed face, upward ! 


CHAPTER IX 
Jack at a Pinch 

“ Keep cool ! Don’t stir ! I ’ll reach 
you in a moment !” 

As the cry, the reassuring cry, came 
ringing down to her, Pemrose felt the 
blood start again from where it was frozen 
at the back of her neck and surge through 
her flattened body, which, greenly spread- 
eagled against that gray rock, the head 
turned slightly aside, was not unlike the 
quaint Indian figure of the Thunder Bird 
upon a pedestal, — the emblem of her 
father’s invention. 

As the first blind moment of terror 
passed — the blankness of the discovery 
that, strain as she might, she could not 
reach that spur of the rock, the nearest 
hand-hold, and draw herself up to safety 



I 


“Keep cool! Don’t stir! I’ll reach you in a 

moment I ” Page 86. 



JACK AT A PINCH 87 

— she saw two rescuing figures loom out 
on high. 

The first was that of the chauffeur, 
Andrew, summoned by a piercing cry 
from Una — Una whose delicate face was 
white and square now as the marshmallows 
in the box under her arm, with which she 
had bribed her friend to the madcap feat 
of sliding backward down a twelve-foot 
rock and sitting in the Devil’s Chair. 

And Andrew the Scot saw the danger, 
heard it skirling in his ears, for he had 
been brought up among mountains. 

He did not quite see what good he could 
do, that staid Church Elder, by joining 
the girl in the Devil’s Seat. 

But he came of a Campbell clan which 
never flinched. 

He was preparing to slide down, himself, 
when an arm — a left elbow rather — 
thrust him rudely back. 

‘‘T-take hold of this rope-end. Throw 
yourself flat on the ground there. Sit 
on him, you girls, so that he may not 


88 PEMROSE LORRY 

be drawn over!” cried a voice, pointed, 
vigorous. 

Pern knew that it was the fiery voice of the 
nickum, the broad-shouldered youth, who 
had sat in the chair before her, whose 
crowing had been responsible for her feat. 

Her colorless face was turned upward 
then and she had seen him push up the 
lower folds of his sweater with his left 
hand — even while its elbow sent the 
chauffeur back — and while his right, 
lightning-like, uncoiled a rope, a lariat, 
worn under it around his waist. 

It was then that he shouted to her to 
^‘keep cool”; and that she, turning her 
head aside against the rock, became a 
living effigy of the Thunder Bird. 

Not waiting to make the rope fast around 
his own body — or his body fast to it — 
he slid down. 

The next moment he was standing be- 
side her in the chair. 

Ha ! So the ‘ pep ’ was in the wrong 
box that time,” he said coolly. 


JACK AT A PINCH 89 

^‘Yes. Last time it was in the ice-box/’ 
snapped she, as coolly, not to be outdone. 

So you did remember — know me — us ! ” 

‘‘ How could I help — remembering — 
that icy train-wreck?” He was slipping 
the rope in a noose under her arms. Per- 
haps, some day. . . . Well ! I ’m glad 
to be ‘Jack at a Pinch’ again, anyway.” 

“R-ready !” he shouted then. 

And Pern was drawn up, to face a High- 
land squall from Andrew. 

“Hoot ! lassie, an’ air ye sech a fechless 
tomboy that a mon mun keep his een 
sticket on ye a’ the time?” the Scot 
angrily demanded. “How cud ye be sech 
a nickum as to try sitting in yon — 
Deev’s Chair ?” 

“Ask — ask the other nickum; he did 
it first,” flung back the rescued one. 

But under cover of the broad scolding, 
the other, the Jack at a Pinch — friend 
in need for the second time — had again 
slipped off, without a word from either of 
the girls. 


90 PEMROSE LORRY 

‘‘Bah! he is a nickum — a mysterious 
imp,” snapped Pemrose, the fire that 
smoldered behind her white face leaping 
up. “Can’t be shyness with him; he 
doesn’t look the least bit shy! Oh-h ! 
what a fool I was to give him a chance to 
help me — save me — in a ‘pinch’, again.” 

Tears were springing to her eyes now, 
— tears of reaction. 

She felt that an eighteen-year-old youth, 
privileged to save her life twice — it 
seemed a privilege at the moment — 
might, at least, have had the manners to 
let her thank him for it. 

“Oh! he’s the nicest and the — hor- 
rid-est — boy I ever saw,” wailed Una, 
in tribute to the train-wreck, still a night- 
mare on her mind. 

Both girls were dumfounded,| as well 
they might be. 

Pemrose, with her blue eyes under jet- 
black lashes — girdled, moreover, with 
her father’s growing fame — Una, with 
lighter eyelashes and hair, and that little 


91 


JACK AT A PINCH 

fixed star of angry excitement blazing 
in one sweet dark eye, they were the kind 
of girls whose good graces a boy would be 
the last to spurn, fair even for daughters 
of Columbia who, democratic in beauty, 
as" in all else, never hatches out an ugly 
duckling. 

They gazed in stormy bewilderment now 
after Jack at a Pinch walking off with his 
party whom, indeed, he had herded away. 

Andrew was looking gloweringly after 
him, too. 

“An’ so he ’s the loon that sat in the 
Chair first!” grumbled the still angry 
chauffeur. “Awweel — ” the “dour” ex- 
pression upon the speaker’s long upper 
lip softening a little — “weel! he may be 
ill-trickit, but he ’s a swanky lad, for a’ 
that. Aye, fegs I an’ braw, too.” 

“Oh! he’s ‘swanky’ enough — swag- 
gering — but I don’t think he’s ‘braw’, 
handsome — not with that little stand in 
his eye — just like Una’s, only more so.” 
Pern added the last words under her breath. 


PEMROSE LORRY 


92 

“ But, oh ! for goodness sake ! let ’s get 
away from here,’’ she cried wildly; ‘‘over 
to the other side of the Pinnacle, any- 
where — anywhere — so that we won’t see 
him again, before his strutting over what 
he ’s done, makes me — makes me — ” 

“Yes — it’s pretty on the other side 
of the hill, easy climbing, much smoother 
— green and spring-like,” assented Una 
soothingly, pouring balm. “It’s all 
covered with young pine trees and just 
a few, very few, tall silvery birches. Not 
rough and rocky as it is this side !” glanc- 
ing shiveringly down the precipice. 

“Not another Deev’s Chair in sight, 
I ’ll be hoping — fegs !” muttered An- 
drew, picking up a basket which he 
had carried from the automobile up the 
low mountainside, and in the late emer- 
gency had set down. 

It contained cocoa, sandwiches, fruit 
and other toothsome dainties for a picnic 
supper. 

“We have permission to make a fire. 


JACK AT A PINCH 93 

^ Pin-na-cle blaze, to — to boil water 
and toast our marshmallows. Oh ! of all 
things, alMl things on this planet — I 
don’t know what we may find on any 
other — that ’s ‘banner it ’s a marsh- 
mallows toast out-of-doors — isn’t it?” 
chanted Una, intoning her delight to the 
trees, the low spruce and pine scrub, as 
she skipped among them, an evergreen 
sprite, herself, for she, too, now wore the 
“bonnie green”, the Camp Fire short 
skirt, middy blouse and captivating Tam- 
o’-shanter — most nymph-like note in 
dress for daughters of the woodland. 

“And — and I just know the dear-est, 
loveliest pin-ey nook,” she went on in a 
choir-boy sing-song; “half-way down the 
Pinnacle’s softer side it is, where we may 
build our fire. Halleluiah ! I suppose I ’ll 
have to get busy and gather fagots, as in 
Camp Fire rank I ’m a Wood Gatherer. 
Oh, dear ! Will you listen to old Andrew. 
Now what is Ae singing ?” 

The Scot, indeed, relaxing from prim 


94 PEMROSE LORRY 

silence and chauffeur ceremony here upon 
the Pinnacle’s height, with only two young 
girls to marshal instead of the mechanism 
of lever and brake — although the former, 
as he had found to his cost might prove 
the worse handful of the two — was alter- 
nately whistling, with lips drily pursed, 
and crooning in the burr-like accents which 
adhered like a thistle to his tongue, his 
version of a very old song : 

Young lassie ! Daft lassie, 

I tell ye the noo, 

I ’m keepin’ some fagots. 

An’ a stick, too, for you ! 

Singing whack fol de ri do ! 

De ri do ! 

A lassie, a dog. 

And an auld rowan tree. 

The mair that you thwacks ’em, 

The better they be !” 

“‘Thwacks ’em !’ Pshaw! he’s fling- 
ing that in my direction — having a fling 
at me — for sitting in the Devil’s Chair,” 


JACK AT A PINCH 95 

laughed Pern, but the laughter was bitter, 
two-edged. ''Oh! Una,’’ she burst forth 
shakily, " as long — as long ’s ever I live, 
I ’ll wish I hadn’t done it, letting — 
letting that Jack at a Pinch, as he called 
himself, that big, boorish boy, play friend 
in need to me-e again. Ugh-h 1” 

Her stung lips quivered and were twisted, 
partly upon the after-taste of terror. 

" Humph I forget it — oh-h 1 forget it,” 
caroled the younger girl. "See that you 
don’t make a trouble out of it, for trouble 
is a hor-rid kettle-o’-fish for the troublers 
— see ! . . . But — listen ! Listen ! 

Surely that ’s singing — singing from some- 
where — other singing !” 

She paused on tiptoe, a green dryad, 
one little hand, fair as a flower-petal, 
curled about her startled ear. 

But Pern was for the moment comfort- 
proof. 

"Bah! ’Tisn’t quite so easy to for- 
get,” she murmured, bitterly. 

Her less fragile fists were mounted one 


96 PEMROSE LORRY 

upon another under her chin as if to 
hold her head up. For the first time in 
her life she felt as if she were being asked 
to drink a cup of humiliation — she, Toan- 
doah’s little pal — and she made wry 
faces over even a sip. 

Humph! Doesn’t it seem queer — 
queer — outlandish?” she snapped, bol- 
stering the piqued head higher with each 
passionate adjective. ‘‘Here for three 
months, ever since February — since I 
recovered consciousness after that freez- 
ing wreck — I Ve been longing, oh ! long- 
ing to meet again the boy whose chaff, 
whose very chaff, warmed one amid the 
horrors. . . . You didn’t hear it; you 
were too far gone. And, now!^^ The 
little fists lashed out. “ Bah I Who could 
ev-er dream that he ’d turn out such a 
‘chuff’, as the boys say — an un-civ-il 
chuff ? . . . Una ! it ’s never — it isn’t, 
it can’t be Camp Fire Girls?” 

“ It is 1 It is 1 I told you I heard 
singing.” 


97 


JACK AT A PINCH 

The answer was shrill with delight as 
the wiry note of the little black-poll 
warbler, nesting near. 

^‘Why! Why! Goodness! That’s 
what I hurled at him; at his crowing, 
cock-a-hoop back!” 

The older girl’s face softened, melted 
into whimsicality now, — into a freakish 
surprise that encircled, like a golden ring, 
her wide-open mouth. 

Up — up from the Pinnacle’s softer side, 
its tender, heavenly side, the chant came 
ringing, the merry chant and challenge: 

“Then — then don’t take a nap. 

For we ’re on the map 1” 

^‘Camp Fire Girls ! Camp Fire Girls ! Here 
on the Pinnacle ‘map’ !” 

Pern caught her breath wildly. Never 
— oh ! never was a turn of the tide more 
welcome. 


CHAPTER X 
Camp Fire Sisters 

Never was a diversion more welcome ! 

“ We ’re on the map, 

R-ready to prove it with snap ! ” 

Snap was in the very sunset as the 
evening breeze learned the song. 

As for the inventor’s daughter, her joy- 
ous relief was now a hop and now a dance, 
anon a pine-caught hullabaloo, as she 
gleefully turned her back upon the Devil’s 
Chair and nickum memories — her face 
to the glowing sun of sisterhood. 

“Camp Fire sisters ! Camp Fire sisters ! 
Was ever such luck?” she cried. “Oh! 
come, let’s find them — let’s join them.” 

“Oh — let us!” assented Una, her 


CAMP FIRE SISTERS 99 

excitement, too, running like wildfire 
through the wood. 

And, presently, the two city girls, waft- 
ing themselves airily over bowlders, thread- 
ing their way in and out among pigmy 
pines, with here and there a needled pa- 
triarch among them, came upon a forest 
scene that might well have wakened 
Queen Mab from her sleep in a cobweb 
net and made her think that some, at least, 
of the fairy dreams with which she in- 
spired mortals had come true. 

A dozen, and more, of sylvan figures, 
the green tassels of their Tam-o’-shanters 
waving like the tasseled green of the cinna- 
mon fern flitted busily in and out among 
their passive brothers, the trees, not pines 
here, but a few beautiful stripling birches 
planted in a sunny spot. 

To these white-stemmed saplings, tall 
and taper-like, some of the nymphs, 
maidens from thirteen to seventeen, were 
playing fairy godmother, affixing to their 
slender trunks placards proclaiming the 


lOO 


PEMROSE LORRY 


exaction of dire forfeits from any wanton 
human churl found guilty of mutilating a 
silver birch tree, stripping it even of an 
inch of tender skin, thus entailing upon 
it decay and death. 

Other of the maidens were gathering 
fagots for an outdoor fire to the tune of 
a version of Andrew’s song, not without 
humor in the present crisis : 

“Singing whack fol de ri do, 

’T will comfort their souls. 

To get such fine fagots. 

When they ’ve got no coals 1” 

One, brisk spoon in hand, was busily 
stirring some fairy brew, batter rather 
— an older figure superintending. Queen 
Mab herself maybe, having a golden sun- 
burst embroidered upon the heaving 
emerald of her breast. 

Now! to these came forth two other 
maidens, emerging, breathless, from the 
Pinnacle pines, and made the hand-sign 
of fire. 

Up went gracefully a dozen green arms. 


CAMP FIRE SISTERS loi 

in charming tableau, as the woodland 
nymphs paused in their work, their curv- 
ing fingers typifying the warmth of the 
curling flame behind the finger — the 
Camp Fire welcome to heart and hearth. 

A genial flame which the Guardian — 
she of the golden maturity — put into 
winsome words, as she approached. 

''Welcome — thrice welcome, — Sis- 
ters!’’ she cried. ‘^We are the White 
Birch Group of Lenox, at present en- 
gaged in protecting our younger brothers, 
the little trees which we planted ourselves. 
I am Tanpa — signifying Birch — Guar- 
dian of the Group ; in everyday life just 
Myra Seaver.” 

"And my name is Lorry — Pemrose 
Lorry — my ceremonial name Wantaam, 
a Wise Woman.” Here the spokeswoman 
for the two strangers had the grace to 
blush, remembering the Devil’s Chair. 
"And this — this is my friend, Una Gros- 
venor, who has just been initiated into 
'Camp Fire.’ We belong to the Woo- 


102 


PEMROSE LORRY 


hi-ye — Victory — Group of Clevedon 
which, you know, is only a hundred miles, 
or so, from here ; and we — ” 

But Tanpa’s face had become suddenly 
fascinated — illumined — to rival the sun- 
burst upon her breast. 

“ ‘ Pemrose ! ’ ’’ She echoed the words 
softly, with transient glow. ‘‘How novel 
— and pretty ! But — Lorry ! Oh-h ! 
you don’t mean to say — you don’t tell 
me — that you ’re anything to the great 
inventor, of whom the whole world is 
talking: the professor who has invented 
an apparatus to — to travel anywhere 
through the air, through space — even to 
reach the moon ? . . . Ah-h, there she 
is now! I wonder if she’s listening to 
us!” 

It was, indeed, at that moment that 
Yachune herself, the Silver Queen, showed 
her placid face above the Pinnacle pines, 
pale on the rim of the waning sunset. 
Did she dream of the Earth-valentine in 
store for her, mild old Mammy Moon? 


CAMP FIRE SISTERS 103 

No knowing! The Pinnacle, the green 
Pinnacle, towered until it seemed very 
near to her with the mounting pride in 
one girl’s breast. 

“Toandoah, the inventor, is my father — 
oh ! Professor Lorry, I mean. The Thunder 
Bird — the record-breaking Thunder Bird — 
is his invention. I call it that ; an ordinary 
rocket he says it is.” 

Well 1 the sky was in Pern’s eyes, of a 
truth, now, enough blue to make a Blue 
Peter, the flag of embarking, the flag of 
adventure; no rudeness of ‘‘nickum”, 
earthbound, boastful, could ever humiliate 
her again, with Toandoah’s emblem in 
her heart. 

Yet, as she felt the Guardian’s saluting 
kiss upon her young forehead, so starred 
by fate, as she was introduced, one by 
one, to her sisters of the White Birch 
Group and was invited, she the center of 
a flattering fuss, to sit with them by a 
Pinnacle blaze, instead of being at the 
pleasant pains to build her_own fire, her 


104 PEMROSE LORRY 

thoughts would turn back — turn back, 
every now and again, to Jack at a Pinch ! 

To the quick-witted, surefooted youth, 
so daring, if so unmannerly — such a 
chuff — who had not even waited to make 
the rope fast around his own body before 
sliding down the rock to the Devil’s Chair 
a second time — and who had, a second 
time too, climbed, unaided. 

But she said nothing of him — or of 
her recent escapade. 

And she was glad that Una didn’t ! 

Instead, she bathed every sore spot 
left by the experience in the glory of telling 
her new friends all that she might tell of 
the romantic, space-conquering Thunder 
Bird, while, above, the Man in the Moon, 
eavesdropping, learned of the surprise in 
store for him. 

Perhaps he cribbed some hint, too, from 
the excited girlish tongue of the demon- 
stration so soon to take place upon Mount 
Greylock, when the invention would be 
tried out; and lastly of the thrilling in- 


CAMP FIRE SISTERS 


los 

vitation to the White Birch Group to be 
present — not then — but on that Great 
Day, far ahead, when the real Thunder 
Bird, full-fledged with magic, red-eyed, 
fiery-tailed, would embark on its hundred- 
hour flight moonward, as Pern was sure 
it would start, no matter where the gold- 
mine to equip it came from. 

Well ! we seem, truly — truly — to be 
treading the ‘margin of moonshine land’, 
don’t we?” said the Guardian dreamily, 
enchantment in her voice. “I — almost 
— feel as if, some day, we might be in- 
viting the Man in the Moon to supper 
with us here on the Pinnacle, to shoot 
himself back in the small hours. Joking 
apart, it does draw the Universe very 
near together, doesn’t it — open the road 
to such wonderful possibilities !” ^ 

Her hands came together as she gazed, 
that graceful, green-clad woman, speech- 
less, transfigured, along the aerial high- 
road on which the Thunder Bird would 
first pay toll by dropping its golden egg. 


io6 PEMROSE LORRY 

its record, off — off beyond the low night- 
clouds to the mysterious sky-ways where 
daylight now mated with dusk and the lunar 
lamps were being softly lighted, even to 
the gateway of Mammy Moon herself. 
Throbbing, she flushed from head to heel, as 
she thought of the two hundred and thirty 
thousand miles to be traversed before the 
first barrier between the heavenly bodies 
had been let down — and the Thunder 
Bird had won home. 

^Tt ’s — too — gr-reat for words,’' she 
said, a break in her voice now. “Well-11! 
if we are not playing hostess to the Man 
in the Moon — quite yet — at least, we 
seem to be entertaining angels unawares, 
with the latest rumors from the sky,” 
laughingly. “How about supper now? 
Later on maybe we can show you two 
dear girls that we — as a Group — can do 
something with red fire, too, a very earth- 
bound something, mere child’s play com- 
pared to the future of your celestial Bird. 
Ha ! But — what ’s — that ?” 


CAMP FIRE SISTERS 107 

And then, for the first time in its yet 
unwritten story, the Thunder Bird had its 
nose put out of joint by a modest little 
earth-bird — a hermit, too, as it would 
be among the starry spaces — by a little, 
brown-backed evening thrush singing its 
good-night song in a thicket of scrub 
near by. 

“O wheel-y-will-y-will-y-z7 -/ !” 

it caroled, as a naturalist has translated 
the wonderful, silver-sweet prelude of the 
master-singer of the woods, the nightingale 
of America, rising, trilling until — now — 
with the voice-throwing magic of the ven- 
triloquist, its song seemed to come from 
quite another corner of the thicket, while 
girls’ hearts melted in their breasts, as, 
climbing a maypole of ecstasy, the notes 
trembled — fluted — upon a gossamer pin- 
nacle of gladness at the close of a perfect 
day. 

‘‘Oh-h!” 

There was no breath in girlish bodies for 


io8 PEMROSE LORRY 

more than the one answering note of 
passion. 

No wonder the Thunder Bird’s nose 
was out of joint. 

Earth has a magic all her own. 

But was it ventriloquism at large ? Had 
the hermit power to throw his melody 
right into the center of the ring of girls — 
so to answer himself ? 

It was the visitors’ turn now for a stu- 
pendous sensation. 

Almost as airy and flute-like, though 
not as liquidly sweet and soaring, were bird- 
notes which answered back from within 
the very halo of Pemrose herself ; and 
she turned, with her heart in her throat, 
to see who — who had the thrush in her 
pocket. 


CHAPTER XI 
Mother Earth’s Romance 

Surely, it was the sweetest grace ever 
said. 

A duet between a hermit thrush and a 
Camp Fire Girl ! Pinnacle vespers ! 

If gladness did not flow freely now, 
then human hearts were a desert ! 

Instead, they were enchanted ground, 
those girlish hearts, carried away by a 
sense that Mother Earth did not, after all, 
have to go outside her own atmosphere 
for her fairy-land, — her golden crown of 
romance. 

“Wheel-y-will-y-will-y-il !” 

preluded again the little brown hermit- 
lover, with the rufous tail and ruffled, 


II2 


PEMROSE LORRY 


‘"Oh! do-o try it again, anyway?” 
pleaded the visitors together. “It’s 
won-der-ful ! We ’ll be as still — as still 
as a nun’s chapel !” 

And obligingly, once more, the human 
thrush lifted up her notes of speckled 
sweetness compared to the silver purity 
of the strength which answered, the hermit 
fluting passionately upon his rock : 

‘‘the song complete, 

With such a wealth of melody sweet, 

As never the organ pipe could blow 
And never musician think or know!” 

Carried beyond himself — perhaps after 
all, he was a lonely hermit — he actually 
hopped from his rock, unalarmed, towards 
the firelight, when — when the concert 
was suddenly interrupted by a woodland 
gorgon ! 

By Andrew who, rearing his six feet two 
of gaunt, hurlothrumbo length from a 
fern-bed, hooking stick in hand, suddenly 
lifted from the embers a boiling kettle. 


MOTHER EARTH’S ROMANCE 113 

‘‘Fegs! ’t was like to scald somebody 
wi’ its daffy simmer,” he explained apol- 
ogetically to the Guardian, being, in his 
capacity of chauffeur, used to camping 
emergencies among these picturesque hills 
— so like, in many respects, the wilds of 
his Scottish Highlands where the Lady 
of the Lake, an original Camp Fire Girl, 
shot her skiff across the blue-eyed loch. 

^^My certy ! but ’t was pretty to see you 
merle, though!” he murmured, having 
restored the kettle to sanity. "‘Fine it 
minded me, ma’am, o’ the time when I 
was a boy, huntin’ like a nickum for the 
nests o’ mavis an’ merle — blackbird an’ 
thrush — when I’d rise "wi’ lark an’ 
light!’ Fegs!” Scotch humor ripping 
chauffeur silence, “yon was a thing to 
make a sober body young again ; a while 
agone I don’t know but I was feelin’ like 
the last o’ pea-time ; an’ — an’, noo. I’m 
a green pea again, ... or I would be but 
for the one sair memory, ” added Andrew, 
the truepenny, under his breath. 


PEMROSE LORRY 


1 14 

‘‘Yes — yes, and you had to go jumping 
around like a parched pea, and frightening 
the beautiful merle, the thrush, away!’’ 
complained Una, aggrieved. “Oh ! how 
did you ever learn to mimic its call, at 
all.f^” she cried, catching at the wrist 
of the human merle, now very practically 
engaged in toasting bacon-strips on the 
end of a stick. 

“ My brother taught me ; my only 
brother. Stud — Studley — Studart they 
nickname him in camp — I don’t know 
why,” was the fluttering response. 

“A corruption of Stoutheart, I should 
say!” supplied the Guardian, now 
busily frying flapjacks. “Of all the Boy 
Scouts in my husband’s troop, he ’s the 
lion-heart,” laughingly. “So I under- 
stand !” 

“Yes, oh! yes, but he ’s so-o nice, with 
it,” cooed the merle’s brown-eyed “mate.” 

He has never — oh ! never — squeezed 
me out of anything, just because I was 
a girl; always said that two — two — 


MOTHER EARTH’S ROMANCE 115 

could hunt together and make good head- 
way !” softly. 

"‘And so they can: and so they will, 
when it comes to the grandest quest of all, 
the hunt for truth and justice at the polls, 
voting side by side ! Girls ! Dear — girls !” 
The eyes of Tanpa, the Guardian, were 
ablaze now with more than the firelight’s 
glow, as she tossed her browned cakes on 
to a platter. ''Dear girls ! In the new, 
the wider future before us — soon to con- 
front all of you — let us bring to it our 
Camp Fire hall-mark: the hall-mark of 
the woods : purity of the Pinnacle’s breath, 
the "pep’ of the outdoor dawn — tender- 
ness of the twilight, when we feel that 
God is near ! . . . And now — and now ! 
let us sing our grace, not for this food 
alone, but for the new manna which has 
fallen for us — the glorious manna of 
opportunity. ” 

‘‘ If we have earned the right to eat this 
bread, happy are we, but if unmerited Thy 
blessings come, may we more faithful be I ” 


ii6 PEMROSE LORRY 

On wings of faith the moved chant 
floated forth, led by the girl-thrush in a 
sweet soprano, supported by the sonorous 
roll of the Pinnacle organ, the murmur- 
ing pine trees ; and the voices of the 
slender tree choir, the slim, white-tunicked 
boy-birches, bore it aloft — aloft to 
Heaven. 

‘'So you ’re not only gifted as a 'merle ’, 
you sing as a girl, too !” said Pemrose pres- 
ently, nestling nearer to the maiden with 
the whistle in her green breast-pocket. 

You must love birds very much in 
order to imitate a thrush-song like that.” 

“Well ! my ceremonial name, as a Camp 
Fire Girl, signifies a little brown bird of 
the woods ; so I thought it was ' up to 
me’ to learn to converse with my kind!” 
was the half-shy, half-spicy answer. “My 
brother Stud and I have no end of fun, 
now in the early summer when the birds 
have just arrived, and are mating, calling 
them around our camp.” 

Here here, let me explain that we 


MOTHER EARTH’S ROMANCE 117 

have a sort of Community camp for boys 
and girls, about three miles from here, 
on the wooded shores of The Bowl, that 
lovely, egg-shaped lake among the hills,” 
put in Tanpa, an air-drawn picture in her 
glowing tones. There are two big bun- 
galows, a couple of hundred yards apart, 
one for the Troop, one for the Group ! 
Of course, we can’t occupy them all the 
time, at present, not until school is closed, 
but we constantly go out there over night 
— to watch the summer coming — and 
for week-ends.” 

‘^Oh ! the lake and the woods around 
it are more wonderful now than at any 
other season of the year,” put in one of 
the older girls, an Assistant-Guardian. 
'‘And we can always keep warm, you 
know, even if there is a cold spell in May, 
because the boys chop wood for us.” 

"Yes, and we do their mending; oh! 
and quite often the shoe pinches — the 
stocking, I mean — when the holes are 
just haggles!” The eyebrows of a fair- 


ii8 PEMROSE LORRY 

haired, pretty girl of fifteen were ruefully 
arched, over eyes of merriment. But 
we do — do have such fun at our Get 
Togethers — our picnics and parties,” went 
on she, whose ceremonial name was Aponi, 
the Butterfly of the mountain group. 

Hur-ra-ah ! There are two such Get 
Togethers coming off quite soon now — 
one the day after to-morrow — Satur- 
day — a picnic at Snowbird Cave, to ex- 
plore some other caves afterwards upon 
the further side of the river, the blue 
Housatonic.” 

This contribution came, piecemeal, from 
several feasting mouths together. 

‘"Oh ! the Housatonic — blue — Hous- 
a-tonic!” Pemrose bent demurely over 
her flapjack and cocoa, curling her toes 
under her as she recalled her view of it 
from the Devil’s Chair. ""And what about 
the second Get Together — when is that 
to be ?” she asked. 

""A week from Saturday : Jubilate ! It ’s 
our anniversary day as a White Birch 


MOTHER EARTH’S ROMANCE 119 

Group when we hold a sort of carnival in 
the afternoon in honor — in honor of the 
de-ar birch trees just bursting into leaf.” 
Aponi fluttered like green tree-hair, herself. 
*‘And that’s to be followed — whoopee! 

— by a party: a real, full-blown June 
dance in the evening — to which all 
the boys are invited. And — and, 
maybe, some girls not of our Groups will 
find an invitation tucked into their stock- 
ings, too,” slily. "‘But for the picnic this 
week the Boy Scouts are hosts.” 

“I guess, if they knew there were two 
strange girls in camp — such girls — 
they ’d scuttle to "come across’ with an 
invitation, too!” laughed the one slangy 
member inseparable from every group, 
whose talk is the long stitch in the thread 
of conversation. 

"" Do you think they would ? Oh ! I 
don’t know about that. Boys are such 

— such griffins, sometimes. ” 

Wormwood was in the eye of Pemrose, 

pointing the accusation, a new and gloomy 


120 PEMROSE LORRY 

pessimism born of the Devil’s Chair and 
Jack at a Pinch. 

''Ours aren’t !” It was the voice of the 
little girl-thrush lifted in blue-jay belliger- 
ence now. ‘‘Our boys aren’t queer fish — 
not a bit!” rising to hot defense of Stud, 
the Stoutheart, who even in callow youth, 
was of opinion that Life in every phase 
was a game for two — in which two, of 
differing sexes, could hunt together and 
make good headway. 

“To be sure, they do love to get off jokes 
on each other — and occasionally on us,” 
went on Jessie, the brown-haired merle in 
maiden form. “They have a society of 
older boys in their camp called the Henkyl 
Hunters’ Brigade. My brother Stud — he ’s 
a patrol leader — belongs to it. And they 
go on the war-path occasionally — and 
publish a bulletin about their doings.” 

What s a henkyl ?” Una’s mouth was 
wide open; upon its gusty breath rode 
horned toads and plated lizards, in imag- 
inary solution. 


MOTHER EARTH’S ROMANCE 121 

‘‘A henkyl! Oh! if you ask them, 
they say it’s a freak of an animal that they 
hunt up and down in the woods, trying to 
get its scalp, or — or catch it alive. Which 
they seldom or never do!” Jessie’s eyes 
sparkled. ^‘Stud says a whole ‘henkyl’ 
is hard to capture ; it ’s so sure to shed its 
horns or its teeth just as you pounce 
upon it.” ^ 

Pern was staring intently at the speaker, 
her black brows drawn together over eyes 
as speculatively blue as ever they had been 
in Toandoah’s laboratory when grasping, 
or trying to, grave problems of the air. 

“Oh! I know. I know!” she cried 
suddenly, the blue breaking up in the 
firelight into a harlequin patchwork of 
merry gleams. “A henkyl! Why-y! it’s 
a joke. A joke that they ’re forever chasing 
up and down, trying to get a laugh against 
somebody, — that absurd brigade !” 

“Companionship with a Thunder Bird 
has sharpened your wits,” smiled the Guard- 
ian. “A practical joke it is, that most 


122 


PEMROSE LORRY 


elusive thing to pull off whole, point and 
all, with the laugh entirely on one side ! 
Well 1 we mustn’t give them any occasion 
to turn the chase against us, air their wit 
in our direction, by failing in our demon- 
stration presently — the signaling prac- 
tice to which we challenged them; eh, 
Tomoke ?” 

“No, indeed !” A sixteen-year-old girl, 
gray-eyed, vibrant with energy, mobile 
as the Lightning, the mettlesome Light- 
ning, from which she took her Camp 
Fire name, spoke up spiritedly. “We ’re 
going to flash a message right across the 
valley, over to old Rouhd-top, that sleepy, 
dark mountain, a couple of miles away, 
just as soon as the daylight is all faded 
out,” she explained. 

“Oh, ho ! That ’s what the Guardian 
meant when she spoke of showing us 
something — a display — with red fire, 
eh?” gasped Pemrose. “How are you 
going to signal — with what code?” 

Morse code — and a good, fat two- 


MOTHER EARTH’S ROMANCE 123 

foot pine-knot, oozing with resin !” smiled 
the Lightning, vivid with inspiration. 
“ How — how about sending over this 
message : ^Two strange girls in camp ; 
you ought to meet them ’ ?” 

“Lovely! That will hit the mark!” 
came the appreciative chorus, to the song 
of logs. “Then — then you’ll see old 
Round-top wake up, quick’s a wink and 
‘come across’ with an invitation — an in- 
vitation to that banner picnic the day 
after to-morrow !” 


CHAPTER XII 

Old Round-top 

“C. F. G.! C. F. G.! 

We are the Camp Fire C. F. G. ! 

Oh ! none with us can compare, 

For we looked over 
And picked the clover, 

And the World ’s lit up 

With our Camp Fires everywhere 

‘‘And, fegs ! wi’ an aging, sober body 
like myseF, if he isn’t a-picking o’ the 
clover blossoms, he ’s a-smelling o’ them 
the night,” softly soliloquized Andrew, 
the chauffeur, as he listened to that halcyon 
song around the Pinnacle blaze — feeling 
barred out of Clover Land himself, as 
he lay among the ferns, because of the 
“one sair memory”, the whiff of heather 
ever and anon wafted to his nostrils, as 


OLD ROUND-TOP 


1 25 

it seemed, from the grave of a fifteen- 
year-old lassie away back in Scotland. 

Hum-m ! if Tweren't for that, I could 
maist fling out an’ dance the ‘ Rigs o’ Barley’ 
a-watching o’ those happy lasses,” he 
whimsically confessed in the ear of a king 
fern. ‘‘ I could, for sure, same ’s we used to 
dance it in the glen around a bonfire!” 

But if the heather in his heart, rein- 
forcing chauffeur primness, checked even 
the first lashing kick of a Highland Fling, 
it did not restrain him, that grave Church 
Elder, from taking part later in some- 
thing fully as giddy; a wild and storm- 
ing torchlight procession. 

"‘Now! what we need, girls, is a good 
r-rich pine-knot, with a juicy, resinous 
knot in it, that will burn ten minutes, 
anyway, for signaling purposes,” said 
Tomoke, the personified Lightning, as the 
“C. F. G.” proclamation over, the magic 
moment came for the flashing of the light 
of this particular camp fire in speaking 
fire from mountain to mountain — across 


126 


PEMROSE LORRY 


the mile and a half of intervening valley. 
That inflammable knot was not hard to 
find. Split with the toy axe which the 
girl who had won an honor bead for signal- 
ing carried at her belt — a modern Maid 
Marion, at home in all woodcraft — it 
blazed, transplendent, a foot-long flam- 
beau, searching the Pinnacle’s darkest 
nooks, winning sleepy birds from their 
slumbers, calling upon them to follow 
too, as Tomoke, nimble of foot as her 
aerial namesake, presently dashed up the 
hill, with it held high ! 

Brilliant as a starshell — where near-by 
objects were concerned — it counted the 
needles upon the little, awed pine trees. 
It painted the wild excitement upon leap- 
ing girls’ faces, lit dancing Jack-o’-lanterns 
in their eyes as, scrambling, they fol- 
lowed the light-shod leader — gold- 
slippered by the torch — in a breathless 
tumble-up over rock and needled carpet, 
amid scandalized bough and shamefaced 
crag and little, blinking torrent. 


OLD ROUND-TOP 


127 


It turned to nocturnal dewdrops the 
bright eyes of the birds, — scandalized, 
too, yet resolved, at all costs, to come in 
on the fun ! 

Robins, flame-breasted in the glow, a 
black-throated green warbler — blossom of 
the night — a purple grackle, its boat- 
tail stiff as a fan-shaped rudder, and, 
‘‘ leggeddy-last,"’ a cawing crow, they 
circled on low wing after the brilliant 
torch, — all pecking at the wonder in the 
air ! 

It caught the whooping amazement on 
Andrew’s smooth-shaven upper lip, shim- 
mering through a veil of anxiety lest, 
somewhere, there might be another 
“Deev’s Chair” around, or a madcap 
lassie to sit in it, as, with an irresistible 
‘‘Hoot mon!” he brought up the rear 
of the fantastic revel; the rush of green- 
clad maidens, the elfin tassels of their 
Tam-o’-shanters waving, and of demented 
birds for the Pinnacle’s tallest crag. 

Poised upon that gray rock-shelf, high 


128 


PEMROSE LORRY 


above the ground, her slight face with the 
shining eyes, framed in the radiant torch- 
light as in a golden miniature, the signaler’s 
right arm held the blazing knot with its 
ragged, foot-long flame at arm’s length 
above her head, then described a brief 
quarter circle to the left with it, quick, 
snappy — once, twice — the arm being 
extended on a level with the young shoulder 
so slim, so stiffened ! 

‘‘See ! — See ! That stands for I : two 
dots ! I, three times repeated, gives the 
call,” breathed the Guardian at Pern’s 
elbow, her mature face a gold-set minia- 
ture of excitement, too. 

“Oh — oh! I wonder if they’ll ‘get 
us ’, those boys — those joking Henkyl 
Hunters ? The throbbing question was 
on every girlish lip. Eyes burned, like 
the torch, across the valley. 
f. The mountains were falling asleep in 
their night-caps of mist. 

I But suddenly one of them, far away, grim 
and dim, lifted an eyelid — and responded. 


OLD ROUND-TOP 129 

The drowsy valley caught its breath — 
as old Round-top winked back. 

Caught its breath with many a waking 
scintilla of light in the pointed flash of 
pool and stream ! 

A momentary, broken arc, a shattered 
rainbow dividing the flood of dusk above 
from the gulf of darkness below ; and 
then — and then the triumphant cry in 
each gasping throat : 

^‘They Ve got us ! They see us ! Now 

— now for the message : ‘Two strange 
girls with us. You . . . ’ ” 

But there the Lightning’s lore suddenly 
gave out, her signaling memory, as the 
news was vivaciously transmitted by 
staccato dot and lengthier dash, the latter 
being the same quarter-circle once de- 
scribed in a single movement to the right. 

Over the valley the message was hung 
up. It was hung up in Pern’s heart, too, 

— and the honor, the fair grace, of boy- 
hood with it. 

If old Round-top unhesitatingly played 


130 PEMROSE LORRY 

up, ‘‘came across” with an invitation — 
an invitation to that alluring Get To- 
gether at the winter palace of the Snow- 
birds, then she would feel that a nickum’s 
rudeness was atoned for — and Jack at 
a Pinch might go his graceless road, never 
to prove a friend in need to her again — 
not if she knew it ! 

“Invite them to the picnic . . . and 
don’t forget the cocoa !” 

The valley fairly bristled with the 
promptness of it — the skilled directness 
of the message, so rapidly, so sponta- 
neously given that the poised Lightning 
on the crag was hard-pressed to keep up 
with the meaning — to read the hand- 
writing of fire and give the interpreta- 
tion thereof. 

Old Round-top had seized the shining 
hour. The Henkyl Hunters were no 
“chuffs”, no conundrums, with the strange 
riddle of incivility up a sleeve. 

“‘Invite them to the picnic — and don’t 
forget the cocoa!’” Tanpa laughed. 


OLD ROUND-TOP 


131 

“Just like them! We did promise to 
lay in a fresh supply of sundries, as we 
pass through the town to-night — if there ’s 
still a store left open. And that reminds 
me, girlies, that it ’s getting late. We have 
no right to keep the birds out of bed any 
longer, demoralizing the feathered world.” 

But the Lightning had recovered its 
morale, its memory, prompted by a Morse 
code-card excitedly snatched from a green 
breast pocket and explored by the light 
of the dwindling torch. 

“Invite — your — friends — to — our 

— d-a-n-c-e,” slowly spelled out Tomoke, 
giving back diamond for diamond. 

She was beginning upon the word “A-11”, 
but the pine-knot winked itself out in a 
dazzlement on “ dance,” — in an effulgence 
of sparks that fell like golden rain upon 
the hearts of the visitors. 

“Will it — will it be an outdoor affair 

— a piazza dance?” gasped Una. 
“Oh-h! I do love .... Now! An- 
drew!” She broke off suddenly at the 


PEMROSE LORRY 


132 

chauffeur’s declaration that it was a 
‘^magerful” show, ^^yon fire-talk”, that 
he never expected to see the like carried 
on by “tids o’ lassies”, but that it really 
wasn’t in him to stand there any longer, 
rolling his eyes over it, like a duck in 
thunder. “Now, Andrew!” reasoned his 
employer’s young daughter. “You know 
that you ’ve driven my father and mother, 
and Professor Lorry, too, to a dinner- 
party, where the professor is to give a 
talk about the Thunder Bird — and oh 1 
may its fiery tale be a long one to-night 
— you won’t have to fetch them home 
for another two hours yet.” 

“Hoot! It’s saft as peppermint I am 
wi’ ye. Miss Una, but it ’s time for all 
lassies to gang home,” returned the other 
with paternal insistence, lifting his cap 
in questioning appeal to the Guardian. 

“ He ’s right, dear. We must be start- 
ing for the home camp, too — just as 
soon as we ’ve seen that our fire is 
thoroughly extinguished,” said Tanpa. 


OLD ROUND-TOP 


133 


^‘Our paths don’t lie in the same direc- 
tion, but we hope they often will in future. 
As to the dance, it will be a piazza affair, 
if the evening is fine — the festive wind- 
up of an exciting day, our White Birch 
anniversary which we celebrate with rites 
and symbolic dancing, in honor of our 
patron, our woodland lady, the leafing 
birch tree.” 

‘"How lovely ; per-fect-ly love-ly !” flowed 
from the visitors, both, in a silvery ripple. 

“Well! how about your spending a 
few days in camp with us then — at our 
camp on the Bowl — if your elders are 
willing?” went on the gracious grown-up 
woman, with warmth as golden as the 
sunburst on her breast. “We ’ll let Pern- 
rose Lorry plant the tallest birch sapling 
in honor of the Thunder Bird. Long — 
long before it ’s a full-grown tree, let • us 
hope, the Bird will have made its great 
migration, crossing, not a continent, but 
space ! And now, dears, au revoir ! to 
meet again at Snowbird Cave.” 


CHAPTER XIII 

) 

Cobweb Weed 

*‘Well ! you certainly are the laziest 
bunch; you’d carry a whole, bakery in 
your knapsacks rather than^do any cooking 
— especially if there " are girls around. 
Lazy as Ludlam’s dog you are ! Next 
time — next time, I ’ll set you to peel- 
ing potatoes.” 

It was the chaffing voice of the Scout- 
master, Malcolm Seaver, which spoke, 
addressing some twenty scouts who were 
scattered about the vine-draped entrance 
to Snowbird Cave, where, yearly, the 
little gray-white junco birds — otherwise 
snow-birds — fluffy balls, with no heads 
to speak of, wintered among the low 
hemlocks near the cavern’s mouth and 
fed upon the spicy hemlock bark. 


COBWEB WEED 13s 

“I — I wonder if you could tell me of 
what breed Ludlam’s dog was, sir? If 
he could burn up daylight chasing his 
tail any better than this crowd can, lolling 
around on a picnic, he must be the limit.” 

The answer came with the low, drawl- 
ing laugh of Stud Bennett, otherwise 
Studart, brother to Jessie, the “merle’s” 
calling mate, who was himself playing 
fiddle-faddle in the sunshine, after a four- 
mile hike. 

“Humph! Well, Pm off to locate a 
spring — where ’s the blue bucket ? When 
I get back you’ll have to turn to, you 
dummies, build a fire and unpack the com- 
missariat — otherwise rolls by the dozen 
dozen. The ‘duff’ and Frankforts are in 
the ‘Baby’, I guess.” The Scoutmaster 
shot a glance at a big, brown duffle bag 
reposing on a mound, capable of contain- 
ten bags of rations, each pertaining 
to individual scouts on a long hike, yet 
hardly sufficient to transport the “cates”, 
the luncheon for eighteen Camp Fire 


136 PEMROSE LORRY 

Girls and twenty scouts, plus a couple of 
invited guests, on a Together picnic. 

'‘Are there any boys and girls who are 
dying to come with me, to prospect for 
water he put forth alluringly, to the 
rhythmic swing of the big water bucket 
in his right hand, painted bright blue. 

There was an instant volunteering flutter 
among certain green-clad girls and lads in 
khaki, breezing up from the grass where 
they had languished ; others held back. 

"I’d rather explore the cave — I love 
creepy caves — and we haven’t been half 
through it yet,” said Pemrose Lorry. 

Forthwith Stud, the Henkyl Hunter, 
decided that cave-exploiting was the pas- 
time for him ; there was rarely a younger 
boy — Studart was barely fifteen — who 
did not become the captive knight of 
this older girl with the sky in her eyes 
under jet-black lashes ! 

Jessie, sister of Stoutheart, she of the 
thrush-song in her heart, wanted to be 
near to the girl who was mate to a Thun- 


COBWEB WEED 


137 


der Bird, too ; and others were drawn by 
the same abstract birdlime — or else the 
bat-stirred cave had lures. 

‘‘There — there ’s a secret lobby in it,’^ 
said Stud, “a dark, rocky passage lead- 
ing off from that queer black, three- 
cornered fissure in the right wall, ten feet 
from the ground — I guess nobody has 
ever explored it ; nobody has cracked the 
nut of what ’s behind that triangular 
crevice, so high up V 

“Come — come; that sounds exciting, 
very exciting !” remarked Tanpa, the Guard- 
ian, remaining behind too, as chaperon. 

But her husband wheeled upon his jog- 
trot off after water, swinging his gal- 
vanized iron bucket after a manner to 
give the air the blues. 

“Well! I wouldn’t try to crack the 
nut, solve the riddle, of what ’s behind 
that queer-shaped crevice, Stud,” he said. 
“It’s black — black as a tinker’s pot 
in there. You wouldn’t know what you 
were heading into!” 


138 


PEMROSE LORRY 


“Aw, gammon! I wouldn’t be afraid 
to tackle that fissure — find out what ’s 
back of it — although I ’m not a Tin 
Scout — ha 1 ha I — out with the whole 
toyshop to-day ; all my monkey trap- 
pings,” exploded a rough voice suddenly 
from among a trio of clownish-looking 
boys who hovered, vulture-like, on the 
edge of the picnic ground, transfixing with 
a sanguinary eye the Baby, whose soft 
heart was of blueberry “duff.” 

“An’ I tell you what ’s more, if I were 
to climb up an’ in there, I ’d trust to my 
own "bean’ and a few matches, ’thout 
any gimcracks,” craked the boastful voice 
further, the special gewgaw on which the 
braggart fixed his eye, at the moment, 
being the little Baldwin safety lamp, four 
inches high, which Stud was just lighting, 
attached to the front of his olive-green 
scout hat. 

“Tr-rust to your own "bean’ — your 
own head — an’ what ’s inside it 1 Well ! 

I ’ll admit it ’s fiery enough,” flouted the 


COBWEB WEED 


139 

Henkyl Hunter, piqued even in the pres- 
ence of girls into giving back tit for tat. 
‘‘ But you ’re carrying too many eggs in 
one basket, let me tell you, and you ’re 
likely enough to take a leap in the dark 
an’ smash ’em all.” 

^ ‘‘Ha! Am I now,” snarled the other, 
resenting the implication that his brick- 
red head was a brash basket into which 
to pack all his chances of safety, such as 
were not anchored to the poor stay of a 
few fickle matches. 

“Am I now-ow?” he chortled, very 
red in the face — and tongue-tied — as 
he shadowed the picnic party through 
the cave. 

At his wits’ end for a verbal retort, he 
presently proceeded, after the manner of 
his kind, to throw a stone in his own 
garden. 

“ See here ! you kids, if you ’ll let me 
stand on your shoulders, you two, I ’ll 
give those Tin Scouts an eye-opener,” 
he said, retaliating after a manner to hurt 


140 PEMROSE LORRY 

only himself, as he addressed the two 
younger boys with him, his eyes cast up 
to that mysterious fissure, outlined, a 
rocky tripod, above his head, of which 
the Scoutmaster had remarked that all 
behind it was black as a tinker’s pot. 

Into that ebony pot, forthwith, climb- 
ing by the willing step-ladder of his com- 
panions’ bodies. Ruddy, the rashling, pres- 
ently thrust his head — that flaming head 
with all his chances in it ! 

His body followed, finding entrance 
through the crevice amidships, so to speak, 
where it broadened out to some three 
feet across from the tapering point of 
the lowest corner. 

‘‘Oh-h ! look at him. Do look at 
him!” panted the girls, held up in their 
search for pale-faced cave flowers and 
strange fungi by the ‘‘derring-do” act. 

“ Gracious ! some of you scouts ought 
to stop him — re-al-ly ought to stop him,” 
shrilled Jessie, catching her breath at 
the shock of darkness visible in the yawn- 


COBWEB WEED 


141 

ing fissure’s mouth, where the brief flicker 
of a match now chased bogies. 

“Humph! We can’t head him off, 
Jess.” Her brother disclaimed responsi- 
bility with a shrug — while the little lamp 
winked sarcastically from his hatbrim — 
but in the heedful tone of the boy who 
had been trained to feel — as Toandoah 
did with his little petticoated pal — that 
Life was a game in which two could hunt 
together, even upon the trail of a Thun- 
der Bird, and make good headway. “We 
can’t turn him back!” Stud shrugged 
his khaki shoulders. “ But he ’ll strike 
a blind bargain in there. Ha ! There 
goes another ^niggling’ match!” 

A frippery flame, indeed, its reflection 
flickered a moment, a gold tooth in the 
fissure’s grinning mouth — darkness fol- 
lowed ! 

Two or three of the boy scouts — those 
who did not, like Stud, show incredulity, 
sarcasm gleaming, hawk-eyed, from a 
ruby lamp hooked to a hatband, and 


142 


PEMROSE LORRY 


from a level eye beneath it — held their 
breath, dazzled ; for the moment beaten 
at their own brave game of exploring. 

So did the girl who had been piqued 
and dared into sitting in the Devil’s Chair 
— with a sheer abyss beneath her ! 

Again did her wide-open, staring eyes, 
under their black lashes, sport a Blue 
Peter, the flag of adventure. 

“Oh! he’s plucky, anyhow. I won- 
der what he’ll find in there.?” her palms 
were laid together upon a spicy filling of 
excitement. “He really is daring — aw- 
fully daring, you know !” 

“Ha! Courage cobweb-weed!” mut- 
tered Stud laconically. “Well — well,' 
he ’ll have tears in his eyes before I go 
after him 1” 

And — with that — there was the 
rasp of a third “niggling” match, faintly- 
heard, far in, a momentary reflection, 
a tiny glance-coal, in the fissure’s leering 
mouth ! And — and, following that, a shriek ! 

A shriek, headlong, sinking and pitch- 


COBWEB WEED 


143 

ing — dying like a falling star, as if some 
clutch were stifling it. 

‘‘Hea-vens!” The girls, blanching, 
shrank against the opposite cave-wall, 
which shuddered behind them. 

A bat, flying low, a winged Fear, 
brushed Tanpa’s cheek, as she stood, trans- 
fixed, — and her cry was almost as hyster- 
ical as theirs. 

In the blackness of that Tinker’s Pot 
behind the looming fissure, were there 
other things — other things besides a boy, 
a broken braggart of a boy ? 

Was Death in the pot with him ? Had 
he sipped of its mystery — only to perish ? 
Death — it seemed a raving possibility — 
in the shape of some wild animal, perhaps 
— a live, a clutching claw ! 

Tales were always current among the 
mountains, trappers’ tales — and most of 
them airy "'traveler’s yarns”, too — of 
strange tracks seen in lonely spots, of 
lynx and bobcat ; and even of the young 
and roving panther. 


PEMROSE LORRY 


144 

To be sure, a three-cornered tunnel, the 
second floor back of a lofty cave, would be 
the last place to look for such an ambush, 
unless there was some fly-trap opening to 
it from above. But there might be ! 

Boys and girls, both, their blood flamed 
upon the fear, then froze — until the 
silence, the bat-churned cave silence, was 
hung with icicles above them. 

Then, once more, it was ripped from 
on top by that perishing shriek — pass- 
ing strange, remote but now it was 
as if the fissure’s three-cornered mouth 
filled with it, faintly gibbered the one 
word: "‘C-caught!” 

'''Caught!' Oh! Stud, you warned 
him ; it ’s his own doing. Let those other 
two boys — his friends — climb up to him ! 
Well — if you feel — you — must?” 

Jessie’s cry gibbered in agony in her 
throat, too, liquid as the thrush-tone in 
terror for its mate. But it struck a high 
note at the end. 

For Stud’s hand was groping mechani- 


COBWEB WEED 


145 


cally for the bright little lamp above his 
forehead, as if for inspiration, his left 
for the lariat at his waist, in defiance 
of his threat that the desperado in the 
^‘pot” might have tears in his eyes before 
he would help him. 

But there was something worse than 
cave-tears in question now — of that 
Studart felt sure. 

And Pern, watching, — Jessie, too — 
caught from an entering shaft of day- 
light which shivered as if aghast, the 
reflection of the tightening glow upon 
his young face — the waggish features of 
the Henkyl Hunter ! 

And she recognized it, by the feeling 
of her stiff, cold cheeks, as she clapped 
her hands to them — did Toandoah’s 
little chum — for the glow which had 
electrified her own when she fought her 
way out of a swamped Pullman, saving 
her friend, driving it into the teeth of the 
flood, and of the World, too, that neither 
her father’s honor, nor his invention — 


PEMROSE LORRY 


146 

nor anything he ever turned out — was a 
Quaker gun ; letting fly with it faintly 
at a rescuing youth, too, when she bade 
him ‘‘take Una first/’ 

For by that glow as by an altar-lamp, in 
whose gleam she had worshiped before, 
she saw as the strong boy’s hand went 
automatically to his equipment that lamp 
and lariat were nothing — nothing — 
“without the heart of a Scout !” 


CHAPTER XIV 
Stoutheart 

“W-wedged! . . . Wedged!” 

Now — now it was another word which 
jabbered faintly in the dark fissure’s mouth ! 
A girl caught it — or thought she did. 

''Wedged!'' she echoed wildly. ‘‘Caught! 
Oh, maybe — maybe — there ’s nothing in 
there but Ruddy himself!” 

“Maybe — so!” Stud panted heavily 
while, across an inner, gaping hollow, the 
next words took a giant stride to his lips : 
“Anyhow — I’m going up !” 

‘‘Oh — Studley !” But beyond this one 
faint cry, Jessie, stanch little partner, — 
the girl behind the lines, — said no more to 
hinder him now, as she watched the scout 
detach his little lamp from his hatbrim 
and hook it on to his khaki breast. 

With it glowing there, a headlight for 


PEMROSE LORRY 


148 

his gallant heart, Stud set himself to climb. 
Standing upon the shoulders of two 
brother scouts, in his belt a club snatched 
from one of them, he reached the lowest 
point of the tapering fissure. 

‘‘Ha! There he goes, in spite of his 
teeth,’’ tremored a younger boy. 

“His teeth aren’t chattering!” Pern’s 
eyes — lightning-blue — hurled back the 
charge. 

The denial rang in Stud’s ears as he 
thrust his head into the black opening, 
entering, amidships, as the former muddle- 
headed explorer had done. 

“That girl’s a trump — the girl with 
eyes the color of the little ‘heal-all’, that 
blue flower we pick up here in May! A 
trump ! But so ’s little Jess, too !” 

Thus did Stoutheart, a knight of to-day, 
pay tribute to the world he left behind him, 
when he felt in his exploring knees, now 
creeping along the bottom of the Tinker’s 
Pot, that there was a chance of his leaving 
it behind forever. 


STOUTHEART 


149 

“I don’t see what else he could have 
done,” said Tanpa, the Guardian, her 
fingers hysterically interlocking. “Some- 
body had to go up ; and he ’s the oldest 
boy — a Patrol Leader. But, oh! I wish 
my husband were here. Run and meet 
him, a couple of you 1” She glanced ap- 
pealingly at the scouts. “Oh! do — and 
hurry him back — back from the spring.” 

Meanwhile Stud had forgotten even his 
backers in the feminine hearts below and 
was banking all on just one trusty ally 
the headlight on his breast. 

“Without the light, the little safety 
lamp, I couldn’t do-o it,” he told himself. 
“Gee ! but it is as black in here as Erebus, 
a Tinker’s Pot, indeed — the blindest pas- 
sage — blindest bargain — I ever struck ! 
So — so sharp underneath, too!” 

Yes, difficulty masked was in the 
“bargain”, yet he crept on over tapering 
ridges of rock that now and again buckled 
like teeth. But he knew by the parched 
sound of his own voice, as he shouted a 


PEMROSE LORRY 


148 

his gallant heart, Stud set himself to climb. 
Standing upon the shoulders of two 
brother scouts, in his belt a club snatched 
from one of them, he reached the lowest 
point of the tapering fissure. 

‘‘Ha! There he goes, in spite of his 
teeth,^^ tremored a younger boy. 

“His teeth aren’t chattering!” Pern’s 
eyes — lightning-blue — hurled back the 
charge. 

The denial rang in Stud’s ears as he 
thrust his head into the black opening, 
entering, amidships, as the former muddle- 
headed explorer had done. 

“That girl’s a trump — the girl with 
eyes the color of the little ‘heal-all’, that 
blue flower we pick up here in May ! A 
trump! But so ’s little Jess, too!” 

Thus did Stoutheart, a knight of to-day, 
pay tribute to the world he left behind him, 
when he felt in his exploring knees, now 
creeping along the bottom of the Tinker’s 
Pot, that there was a chance of his leaving 
it behind forever. 


STOUTHEART 149 

“I don’t see what else he could have 
done,” said Tanpa, the Guardian, her 
fingers hysterically interlocking. “Some- 
body had to go up ; and he ’s the oldest 
boy — a Patrol Leader. But, oh! I wish 
my husband were here. Run and meet 
him, a couple of you 1 ” She glanced ap- 
pealingly at the scouts. “Oh ! do — and 
hurry him back — back from the spring.” 

Meanwhile Stud had forgotten even his 
backers in the feminine hearts below and 
was banking all on just one trusty ally 
the headlight on his breast. 

“Without the light, the little safety 
lamp, I couldn’t do-o it,” he told himself. 
“Gee I but it is as black in here as Erebus, 
a Tinker’s Pot, indeed — the blindest pas- 
sage — blindest bargain — I ever struck! 
So — so sharp underneath, too!” 

Yes, difficulty masked was in the 
“bargain”, yet he crept on over tapering 
ridges of rock that now and again buckled 
like teeth. But he knew by the parched 
sound of his own voice, as he shouted a 


PEMROSE LORRY 


ISO 

question, that his courage might have ended 
in smoke, there and then, if it weren’t for 
the little lamp at his breast. 

So rosily it burned now, in here, that its 
feeding oil seemed the red blood of his 
heart ! 

‘‘Anyhow — anyhow, with it. I’ll be 
able to see which way the cat jumps !” 

Here, Stoutheart more tightly gripped the 
club ; the last words might prove more 
than mere figure of speech. 

From ahead came strange, gurgling, 
choking sounds, rising from somewhere — 
growing weaker. 

“Where — where are you. Ruddy ? 
Answer! R-rap — rap out something, if 
you can 1” he adjured. 

And it was — truly — a rapping reply 
that reached him ; a queer, hollow knock- 
ing at the door of some throat that seemed 
shutting. 

“My word! What on earth . . . what 
in thunder’s got him ?” Stud felt his own 
breath blow hot and cold together, but — 


STOUTHEART 151 

at this crucial moment it came back to 
him — the eyes of a girl out there had 
driven it home, with blue lightnings, that 
he did not have to defy his teeth. 

“ Humph ! I ’m no quitter,” he told 
the piloting breast-ray, blazing its ruby 
trail ahead. “Well- 11 ! for the love of 
Mike! Well! what do you know about 
that? . . . What have we h-here?” 

In answer to his gasping snort, as he 
gaped and gasped there in the darkness, 
the little safety lamp told him what it 
made of it — of the staggering sight — it 
made a pair of big feet in rough cowhide 
boots tightly wedged by the ankles in a 
buckling switch of rock where two sharp, 
narrow ridges that formed the bottom 
of the Tinker’s Pot dovetailed into each 
other, — after the manner of rails at a 
switch. 

Ruddy, the slipslop explorer, had gone 
in heels over head, so to speak. He was 
hanging by the heels now. Nothing vis- 
ible of him but those pinioned feet ! 


IS2 


PEMROSE LORRY 


** Hea-vens! he did strike a blind bargain. 
S-such a snag ! The passage ends here. A 
drop ! A — blank — fall of rock ! Gee-ee !” 

Dank — dank as cave-tears now was the 
moisture upon Stud’s forehead. For the 
first time his teeth almost chattered. What 
would he see when he held the lamp over 
the edge of the Tinker’s Pot into the 
horror of that empty space beyond where 
the passage broadened into blankness and 
the rock shelved sharply down .? A dead 
boy ? Or one so far gone from hanging 
that he could not be rescued .? 

At the first sight of those wedged feet 
he had felt inclined to laugh. Now he was 
laughing at the wrong side of his mouth, 
as he peeped over the brink. 

“Oh-h! the rock isn*t perpendicular; 
it slants down, though, pretty sharply — 
down into an inner cave — by gracious ! 
And Ruddy, the way he ’s hanging his 
nose, is within an inch or two o’ the floor 
of that other cave ! . . . And, yet, he ’s 
helpless! Helpless as if he had a halter 


STOUTHEART 153 

round his neck ! Oh-h ! if some of the other 
fellows were here.” 

But Stud did not seem to be quite alone ; 
he was one and a half ; for the hearts of 
two girls were pendent from his neck; 
outside he knew they were backing him, — 
praying for him. 

Also, that frenzied gurgle from the vic- 
tim’s throat, his choking cry as the light 
struck him, the squirming body and up- 
rolling eyes told the boy scout that he was 
just in time ; although the foam was 
pink upon Ruddy’s lips and his congested 
head was a fire-ball, indeed, — that brash 
head with all his chances in it. 

‘‘Ha! 

<‘No Loyal Scout gives place to doubt," 
But action quick he shows 1 ” 

The song, his own, the original march- 
song of his troop, sang itself through Stud’s 
brain, seethed in the low whistle upon his 
lips, as, guided by his ruby breast-eye, 
he slid down into that strange and secret 


PEMROSE LORRY 


IS4 

dungeon in which the black passage ended 
and, thrusting his sturdy shoulders under 
the pendent body of the victim whose 
convulsed hands clutched vainly at the 
bare slab, raised it so that the choking boy 
could breathe freely again — and in due 
time shake off the dizziness of his awful 
plight, hung up by the heels by the rock 
itself. 

But not until the Scoutmaster came to 
his patrol leader’s assistance could those 
pinioned feet be really freed and their 
owner brought to daylight again, not by 
a return via the fissure route, but hoisted 
in a rope-noose, as Pern had been from the 
Devil’s Chair, through a grass-covered 
opening discoverable in the roof of that 
inner cave. 

“Goodness ! after all, he was n’t so much 
more foolish — headstrong — than I was. 
But Una ! Una ! If you ever-r tell them !” 
Thus did the maiden of the chowchow name 
spill her spice into her friend’s ear, — burn- 
ing spice, for, privately, she was shocked 


STOUTHEART i5S 

at seeing her own folly, parodied, vulgar- 
ized, as it were. 

“Well! I should say! He was hang- 
ing between hawk and buzzard — if ever a 
fellow was,” happened to be Stud’s moved 
comment as, clinging to that lowered rope, 
he was hoisted, too, through that covert 
opening, the loyal little lamp upon his 
breast paling now into a penny candle 
held towards the sun. 

But the rescuer’s halo did not pale. 

It burnished the picnic luncheon which 
followed, encircling, rainbow-like, little Jes- 
sie who basked in it more than did the 
rebellious hero, pelted with wild flowers by 
the girls — as symbolic of other bouquets. 

“Oh ! let up — let up - ’ will you ? 
Those big fellows will take me for the 
‘goat’ — somebody’s ‘goat’!” protested 
Stud helplessly, striving to direct attention 
from himself by training it upon a straggling 
group of distant youths, really too far off 
to take stock of what was going on among 
the merry picnic party. 


PEMROSE LORRY 


156 

But Pemrose was taking stock of them. 
Her widening eyes, her reddening cheeks, 
the little piqued shiver that electrified her 
chin, told that one figure — one figure — 
called for recognition; called for it, in- 
deed, so loudly that it couldn’t be denied 
him. 

Every member of that group — a canoe- 
ing party, a wading party, it was, just 
landed from the near-by river, the blue 
Housatonic — was a blaze of color. 

But the sturdiest among them was sim- 
ply barbaric. The warm sunlight of May 
dripped golden from his nickum shoulders, 
bronzed to the hue of a statue, bathed his 
bare knees and feet. His khaki shorts, the 
flame of an apricot jersey, the black and 
yellow cap, — the sheaf of mayflowers within 
his arm. 

Oh ! how boys — big boys — do revel 
in color. A girl — any girl I ever knew — 
is demure in her taste beside them,” mur- 
mured the Camp Fire Guardian, with 
amused, motherly tolerance. 


STOUTHEART 


157 


“ Pshaw ! I think it ’s hor-rid. So 
flashy!” snapped Pemrose ; Jack at a 
Pinch had made gorgeous his incivility and 
was parading it before her eyes. 

“Oh, boy! Look at that middle fellow. 
He’d have a grosbeak ‘skun a mile’!” 
gasped Stud, following the direction of her 
glance, with a virtuous consciousness of 
his own cave-soiled khaki, moderately lit 
by merit badge and service stripe. 

“‘Grosbeak!’ Oh, but I love gros- 
beaks ! And all that color — why ! it paints 
the landscape,” came flatteringly from 
Aponi, the White Birch Butterfly, least 
Priscilla-like in her tastes of the Group, 
when she was not in Camp Fire green, or 
soft-toned ceremonial dress. 

“Maybe ’twill paint the blues in old 
*Pory Cave, if we run across them there, 
put in Tomoke, maiden of the flambeau 
and the fire-talk. “They certainly are a 
perfect ‘scream’, those big boys,” her eyes 
merrily following that clamor of color 
now wending back towards the canoes. 


PEMROSE LORRY 


IS8 

“Humph! they’d have to "go some’ to 
leaven the blues of Tory Cave,” remarked 
the Scoutmaster, laughingly addressing 
himself to a roll. ""The biggest bonfire on 
earth wouldn’t half dry the cave-tears 
there.” 

""Yes, that’s the den of the Doleful 
Dumps — their diggings!” laughed a 
younger scout, flourishing aloft a mess- 
mug, the gray of his rolling eyes. "" Bats — 
bats as big as saucers — no, soup-plates ! 
And, far in — far in — the sound of running 
water, like a weak wind !” 

""Running water! Invisible running 
water ! A — weak — wind ! Oh-h ! do let 
us hurry and go on there. We have to 
cross the river ; haven’t we ?” The gurgle 
of that cloistered brooklet was already in 
Pern’s heart as her dilating gaze spanned 
the Housatonic, broad and open, ""war- 
bling”amid its soft meadow slopes, as she 
had looked upon it from the Devil’s Chair. 
"" But, goody ! I hope we worit run across 
him there — Jack at a Pinch! Flaunting 


STOUTHEART 


IS9 

round like a grosbeak!” She bit the 
thought into an olive. “ Stud’s no grumpy 
riddle — if he is a Stoutheart, like the 
other !” 


CHAPTER XV 
Airdrawn Aeroplanes 

Running water ! Invisible running 
water ! The voice behind the scenes 
prompting the play, — the grim play of 
bat and rat and reptile in old Tory Cave, 
where the rocks wept, the little strolling 
sunbeams clapped their hands, and the 
great fungi, primrose-skirted, drooped over 
a drama never finished ! 

It was even more romantic than the 
girls had hoped for, — such romance as 
clings, cobweb-like, to melancholy. 

Like a weak wind, truly, a sad wind 
blowing from nowhere, was the purl of that 
hidden streamlet whose mystery no man 
had penetrated — nor ever seen its flow — 
mournfully as cave tears it dripped upon 
the ears and hearts of the girls. 


AIRDRAWN AEROPLANES i6i 


“ Pshaw ! Who cares for weeping rocks, 
though they look as if they were bursting 
with grief and ready to tear their pale hair 
— that queer growth clinging to them. 
Humph ! Only crocodile tears, anyhow, 
like ‘Alice in Wonderland!”’ cried Ista, 
the laughing Eye of the White Birch 
Group, whose everyday name was Polly 
Leavitt. 

“ It ’s not the tears and it ’s not that 
horribly sad lake with the little, blind, 
colorless fish in it, that I mind — it ’s the 
Bats !” screamed Una Grosvenor. “Oh-h I” 
as the mouse-like head of the cave mammal 
and its skinny wing almost brushed her face. 

“Well! They’re not brick-bats,” came 
reassuringly from one of the boys, as the 
Togetherers ranged through the outer part 
of that vast Tory Cave — once the hiding- 
place of a political refugee, whose spirit 
seemed flitting among them in the filmy 
cave-fog which, dank and mournful, clung 
about the margin of that strange lake of 
fresh water where blind fish played. 


i 62 


PEMROSE LORRY 


Presumably fed by that cloistered brook- 
let, whose cell, far in, in an impenetrable 
recess, no human foot had ever trod, the 
lakelet had the floor to itself, so to speak, 
so that in places scouts with their lamps, 
and girls pairing off with their exploring 
brothers, one piloting eye between them, 
had difficulty in skirting it — without a 
ducking. 

^‘Whew! a ducking in the dark — a 
cave-bath — horrible \ ” cried Pemrose. 
‘‘Oh, mer-rcy ! what — what is it 

“ Bah ! Only a garter snake — a pretty 
fellow,’’ laughed Studley, picking the slim, 
striped thing up from a corner of the blind 
lake where it was amphibiously basking, 
and letting it curl around his khaki arm, 
investigating the merit badges of the patrol 
leader. 

The green and red of the life-saver’s 
embroidered badge, the crossed flags of the 
expert signaler, the white plow of the 
husbandman, they enlivened the gloom a 
wee bit, winking up at the safety lamp 


AIRDRAWN AEROPLANES 163 

hooked to his hat-band, as he bent over the 
illumined reptile. 

But they did not challenge it as did the 
flash of an apricot sweater, blood-red in 
the ruby lamplight, of a black and yellow 
cap, several yellow and black caps, sud- 
denly — eagerly — thrust near. 

“He’s big — big for a garter, isn’t he. 
Buddy?” remarked a voice that did not 
come from the ranks of Togetherers, of 
Boy Scouts and Camp Fire Girls, excitedly 
scrutinizing Stud’s novel armlet. 

Neither — neither was it the voice of the 
nickum, so much Pemrose knew, as she 
edged coldly a little away, — a little nearer 
to the dim and sighing lake-edge. 

Yet he was among them, those gaudy 
big boys, whose flare of color merely striped 
the cave-dusk, like the dingy markings 
upon the snake’s squirming back. 

He actually had his armful of mayflowers, 
too, the nickum, not the snake; passe 
mayflowers, with the tan of decay on them, 
was nursing them carefully, as if they were 


PEMROSE LORRY 


164 

part of a long lost heritage into which he 
had lately come — as if he were afraid 
to lay them down lest some alien should 
snatch them from him. 

‘‘He doesn’t look like a ‘chuff’ — a 
boor. He looks like a really nice college 
boy, one with a hazing imp in his eye 
though, lur-rking in that little star — 
almost a squint ; so — so like Una’s,” 
thought the inventor’s daughter, familiar 
with the student brand of boy. “Yet 
how could he be so uncivil to us, really — 
actually — snub us, after all he did, too ? 
Goodness ! wouldn’t I like to get a chance 
to snub him ?” It was the Vain Elf 
which slept in the shadow of the Wise 
Woman in the breast of Pemrose Lorry, 
that stored this wish, laid it up, a 
vengeful arrow in the blue quiver of her 
eyes, now shooting piqued, sidelong glances 
at those flaunting big boys. “ Why-y should 
we run up against them here ? Well ! 
he’ll never get a chance to play Jack at a 
Pinch — friend in need — to me again. 


AiRDRAWN Aeroplanes 165 

Watch me — watch me pick my steps!” 
She picked them so at random, at the 
moment, moving off, that she came near 
slipping in for that eerie ducking, with the 
blind fish — pale as phantoms, swimming 
round — and Stud, flinging the striped 
garter away, hurried after her — Jessie, too I 

“ Gee I this is a peach of a cave ; isn’t 
it?” effervesced the scout sarcastically. 
“Melancholy so blooming thick that you 
could almost sup its sorrow with a spoon, 
eh?” 

“ It ’s a regular cave of despair.” The 
lonely trill of the feathered hermit was in 
Jessie’s answering note. “That sad voice 
of water, a cascade — a stream — far in, 
which nobody ever saw I” 

“I’d give worlds to see it!” said Pern- 
rose. 

“So would I !” Stud’s voice was pitched 
high. “If it weren’t for the Scoutmaster. 

. Tradition says that whoever drinks 
of that hidden water will have luck.” 

“Well ! I ’d let somebody else have the 


i66 


PEMROSE LORRY 


piping times if I were you, Buddy — if 
they depend on a draught from that mys- 
terious spring.” 

Now, it was the nickum who answered ; 
the same scintillating tones they were — 
how bully they sounded then — which had 
quoted Shakespeare on ‘‘Something rotten 
in the State of Denmark”, amid other 
depressing waters, half hidden, half liber- 
ated by their ice-cloak. 

“I can look out for my own ‘piping 
times’ — thank you ! And I ’m not going 
to buy any pig in a poke — take any leap 
in the dark.” 

The scout’s reply was bristling. To a 
fifteen-year-old patrol leader, a Henkyl 
Hunter, who went up and down upon the 
trail of a joke, there was a smack of con- 
descension about that “Buddy”, used twice 
by those big boys ; perhaps he, too, at 
that moment, laid up something against 
the youth of the flaming tone and rig. 

“ Humph ! hasn’t he the nerve, butting 
in ?” he muttered. 


AIRDRAWN AEROPLANES 167 

“ He has — has all sorts of nerve,” agreed 
Pemrose readily, glancing sideways after 
the boy whose courage she knew to be 
as high as his colors. 

“The Scoutmaster wouldn’t hear of 
our venturing in so far as to investigate 
that running water, anyhow,” said Stud- 
ley. “My eye ! What ’s the rumpus now 
— the kettle o’ fish ? ” 

It was a shriek from one girl half-a- 
dozen girls. It was a loud hiss, almost a 
whistle, from some pallid vegetation near 
the lake-edge. It was a black snake rear- 
ing a blue-black head and glittering eye 
within three feet of Una Grosvenor, novice 
among Camp Fire Girls, whose scream tore 
at the very stones of Tory Cave until they 
cried out in echo. 

It was a dozen green-clad girls scattering 
wildly this way and that, olive-green aspen 
leaves tossing in a whirlwind, shuffling from 
pillar to post — >from rock to darkling rock. 

It was — it was a powerful reptile form, 
in armor of jetty scales, trailing its six-foot 


i68 


PEMROSE LORRY 


length away, the noise of its mighty tail- 
blows against the earth and flying pebbles 
calling all the Dumps — the Doleful Dumps 
— out of the dens where they hid here, 
making them take strange and shadowy 
shapes, gigantic shapes, of threat. 

Let me get out ! Oh-h ! I want to get 
out, away — an5rwhere ! ” shuddered Una. 
‘‘This is no-o fun.’’ 

“Yes! it is — once you get used to it,” 
laughed Pemrose, who — together with the 
Jack at a Pinch still hovering near — liked 
her excitement warm. “Look — look at 
him crimp himself along ! Ever — ever see 
anything so crooked as the great muscle 
in the reptile’s body contracted and re- 
laxed upon its hasty retreat. “When we 
girls had our War Garden, a year ago, an 
old farmer said we planted our potato rows 
so straight that he ‘vummed ’twould make 
a black snake seasick to cross from one to 
the other.’ ” 

“Ha! Because he just naturally has to 
go ajee!” laughed her scout knight, esti- 


AIRDRAWN AEROPLANES 169 

mating the length of that scaly corkscrew, 
if uncoiled, with his eye. “ Pshaw ! I Ve 
tamed ’em — and killed ’em, too,” he 
added. 

“Yes! a black snake wouldn’t harm 
you, even if he did bite.” Pern was still 
reassuring her friend. “Did you hear him 
whistle ? . . . But — but what ’s that ? 

It was just half a minute later that she 
put the question. “He isn’t making that 
noise with his tail still ; is he ?” 

She looked at Stud. Under the ruby 
eye of the lamp his face the face of a 
Stoutheart — had turned suddenly pea- 
green. 

His eyes were fixed upon a gleam of 
bloated yellow dimly seen, under the lee of 
a rock, not very many yards away — the 
venomous, pale yellow of the dropsical 
cave fungi. 

“Why — why! it’s only one of those 
horrid, blowzy, mushroom things. But 
what 's the noise — like — like somebody 
rattling little marbles, dry peas ?” 


PEMROSE LORRY 


170 

The girl felt her own breath go ratatat 
as she put the question. 

^‘Oh-h! only some fellow rattling — rat- 
tling — beans in his pocket. Let ’s get 
away — quick 

And then Pemrose knew what it was to 
look upon a Stoutheart ‘‘rattled.’’ 

But, with that, a voice, a cry, not loud, 
but strong, exploded like a spring gun in 
the cave, — suddenly halting advance. 

“What ’s that outside ? What ’s that 
outside?” it whooped. “Is it an aero- 
plane ? Two aeroplanes ? Oh ! hurry out 
— and see.” 

“A dozen aeroplanes! A corps of aero- 
planes!” boomed back those flaunting big 
boys, of whom the nickum was leader, 
playing up to the cue of the Scoutmaster 
who had started the concentrated cry. 
“ Oh, hurry — hurry !” 

She saw him fling his mayflowers on the 
ground, that strange youth, and snatch at 
Una’s hand, to drag her along towards 
the low cave entrance. He made a 


AIRDRAWN AEROPLANES 171 

wide, circling movement to catch at hers, 
too. But she dodged it. Never more 
should he play Jack at a Pinch to her! 
Never ! 

Through old Tory Cave there surged 
the noise of a rising wind, silencing that 
weak gust afar off, now baleful, the sound 
of the hidden water ; reverberating among 
the rocks, it might be taken for anything, 
for the hum of aircraft — for a perfect 
onslaught of sky cavalry I 

And the Scoutmaster’s cry was con- 
vincing. 

Yet — yet, when boys and girls tumbled 
tumultuously through the cave entrance — 
the girls by some mysterious understanding, 
first — not a remote sign of a biplane, 
even a meager one, decorated the sky 
overhead. 

No flying wires sent down their chal- 
lenge. And the hum resolved itself into 
what it was ; the rising, random mockery 
of Ta-te, the tempest, laughing at their 
searching looks, going north, south, east 


172 


PEMROSE LORRY 


and west, aloft, skirmishing in bewilder- 
ment to all points of the horizon. 

^^Hum-m. There isnT a sign of a buzz- 
wagon ! Who pulled off that stunt — on 

— us.^” bleated a few of the mystified 
younger boys, while Stud silently brushed 
moisture like cave-tears from his forehead. 

So did the tall Scoutmaster, heavily 
breathing relief. 

"‘Not an aeroplane in sight ! Not a 
single one breezed the girls, all ready to 
be angry. “Who — who put that hoax 
over.?” 

“Varnish right — and aeroplane wrong !” 
It was the freakish voice of a nickum which 
answered. “No! No buzzer, as the boys 
say, but there was a rattler, in there, beside 
that rock. If some of you girls had gone 
ahead, you M have stepped right on him!” 

“A "rattler!’ A big rattlesnake! And 

— and you started the cry, to get us out 
quietly — quickly !” 

“Not we! The Scoutmaster had the 
presence of mind to launch an aeroplane. 


AIRDRAWN AEROPLANES 173 

We boomed it/’ came the laughing reply, 
as Jack at a Pinch, second fiddle now, 
marched off with his companions. 

"‘Who — is he?” Pemrose caught wildly 
at the arm of Stud, who was wishing that 
he and not those patronizing big boys 
had caught the Scoutmaster’s cue and 
created airdrawn aeroplanes by the corps. 
“ Do you — do you know who he is ; 
that biggest — that gaudiest — one among 
them ?” 

“Yes! No-o! I do — an’ I don’t!” 
stammered the boyish Henkyl Hunter. “ I 
— we — ” indicating his scout brothers — 
“have met him a couple of times in the 
woods ; I guess his father an he have a 
camp on the opposite side of the lake from 
ours. We ’ve talked with him — tried to 
be friendly. And he — he ’s always jolly, 
you know — like now ! But but when 
it comes to finding out anything about 
either of them, gee, you might as well 
whistle jigs to a milestone — so-o you 
might !” 


CHAPTER XVI 
The Council Fire 

“Across the lake in golden glory, 

The fairy gleams of sunlight glow. 

Another day of joy is ending, 

The clouds of twilight gather low.” 

Another day of joy, indeed ! Without 
peril of rattlesnake — or marplot nickum 
to spoil it ! 

“ ‘ Varnish right — and aeroplane wrong !’ 
That ’s what he said when they laid that 
trap to get us out of the cave, without any 
fuss. But I say it’s: ‘Varnish right — 
and puzzle wrong!’ All wrong!” snapped 
Pemrose to herself again and again, repeat- 
ing an old saying during the week following 
that first Get Together. “Nobody — no- 
body has a right to drift around as a puzzle, 
these days ! If ever I get a chance, see me 
snub him har-rd — though he did rescue 


THE COUNCIL FIRE 


175 


me twice ! Well, thank goodness ! it was 
the Scoutmaster, not he, who played Jack 
at a Pinch in Tory Cave.” 

And it was the Scoutmaster, in days 
gone by, with the help of his boys, who had 
built the great stone fireplace in the girls’ 
bungalow in which a brilliant Council 
Fire was now blazing. • Across the lake 
the golden glory stole, and girls came tip- 
toeing to the hearth-flame in soft, cere- 
monial dress, fringed and beaded, the fire- 
light, like dawn, flushing the pearl of their 
headbands, — and Pern forgot the enigma 
of that eighteen-year-old youth who seemed 
to have a trick of bobbing up, now and 
again, under the lee of a summer holiday, 
like some menacing spar to leeward of a 
vessel in fair sail. 

Well ! to recall Stud’s figure of speech, 
nobody was “whistling jigs’ to his mile- 
stone heart now — or trying to. The fire 
was the fiddler; and wax was not softer 
or more responsive than the pliant breasts 
on which its music fell. 


176 


PEMROSE LORRY 


“I watched a log in the fireplace burning” ^ 

They whispered it one to another and 
under the spell of its transfiguring lay, 
bent forward, they witnessed the last act 
in a pine-tree pantomime. 

A dazzling transformation scene it was : 
in the glow they could see, summed up, 
each transition of light and heat that went 
before : dawn’s tender flame, the fierce 
blaze of high noon, ruby rays of evening 
streaming now across the Bowl — hill- 
girt lake without — gathered, all gathered, 
in a golden age behind them to feed the sap 
of a noble tree, here poured forth, amid a 
radiant ballet of flame and spark, to furnish 
life, light — inspiration — to a Council Fire. 

“I watched a log in the fireplace burning. 

Oh ! if I, too, could only be 
Sure to give back the love and laughter, 
That Life so freely gave to me !” 

Tanpa, the Guardian, softly breathed 
it. And in the eye of more than one girl 
the wish was transmuted into a tear, — 


THE COUNCIL FIRE 


177 


Into something more tender, more trans- 
ported, than a laugh, as the log, in a final 
spurt, gave all, and fell, like a tired dancer, 
upon the broad hearth, its rosy chiffons 
crumpled and fading into the pale gray of 
wood-ashes. 

‘‘There it goes!’’ The eyes of Pemrose 
were a patchwork now, flame embroidered 
upon their shining blue ; oh 1 if she were 
to give forth what Life gave to her, which 
of her Camp Fire Sisters would have such 
riches to reflect ? 

It had been hers — hers — to share the 
dream of a great inventor, to look forward 
with him to the pioneering moment — the 
beginning of that which would surely, in 
time, draw the Universe visibly together — 
the moment when the Thunder Bird should 

fly- 

She never qualified that dream by an if, 
wherever the funds to equip it might come 
from — or even if it had to wait a dozen 
years, Toandoah’s triumph, like that for- 
tune “hung up — ” for the great Bird to 


PEMROSE LORRY 


178 

make its new migration to the moon, in 
proof that space was no barrier — when 
the Thunder Bird, giving all, as the log had 
done, would drop its skeleton upon the 
desert of that silent satellite. 

But there were steps to be taken in the 
meantime — exciting steps in the ladder 
of success. Those patchwork eyes, looking 
into the flame now, counted them, one by 
one, and hung in breathless anticipation 
upon the first : upon the moment, so soon 
to come off, when old Greylock would 
really send back a shout of gladness, for 
on his darkling summit the hand of a Camp 
Fire Girl of America would press the but- 
ton and loose the lesser Thunder Bird to 
fly up the modest distance of a couple of hun- 
dred miles, or so, with its diary in its head, 
and send back the novel record of its flight. 

‘‘I — do — believe that my father sleeps 
with one eye open, thinking of that golden 
egg, as he calls it — the little recording appa- 
ratus,” she said, when the White Birch 
Group, as one, asked that the special pro- 


THE COUNCIL FIRE 


179 


gram for this ceremonial meeting should be 
a talk from an inventor’s daughter upon 
this most daring enterprise of the age. 
“He says that if that does not drift back 
to earth safely with the crow-like parachute 
— if anything should happen to it, to the 
two little wheels, with the paper winding 
from one on to the other, all dashed with 
pencil marks — ^^the world would call him 
a fool’s mate. ... If it did!” Perns 
teeth were clinched. “ But, of course, with- 
out the record, there would be nothing to 
show how high the little rocket had really 
flown — showing the bigger one the road,” 
with an excited gasp. 

“Yes, I can understand how anxious 
he must be about the safe return of the 
egg — or the log — whichever you choose 
to call it — the first record from space, 
anyway.” Tanpa’s tone was almost 
equally excited. “And of course the wind 
may piny pranks with the parachute 
drift it away down the mountainside 1” 

“So that we ’d lose it in the darkness — 


i8o PEMROSE LORRY 

oh-h!’’ Pern shivered upon the thought. 
‘‘But we’ll all be on the lookout to prevent 
that, as many of us as are there — and that 
won’t be more than a picked few, Dad says, 
to witness this first experiment. . . . When 

— when the real Thunder Bird flies, though 
— ” she turned those patchwork eyes now, 
sky-blue, flame-red, upon her companions 

— “you ’ll all — all-11 be there. And, oh ! 
won’t it — won’t it be a sight to watch — 
it — tear ?” 

Drooping towards the fire-glow, lips 
parted in entranced assurance, the slight 
figure became lost in the same dream which 
had held it months before in a February 
Pullman, while a daring flame, like a red- 
capped pearl diver, plunging into the mys- 
tery of that fairy thing, that gleaming 
stole about her neck brought out milky 
flashes of luster — together with those New 
Jerusalem tints, jade and gold and ruby. 

Finished now it was, the pearl-woven 
prophecy — fair record to go down to 
posterity ! 


THE COUNCIL FIRE i8i 

In faith — such faith as had inspired 
Penelope, faithful wife, of old, to weave 
and unravel her endless web, steadfast in 
the belief of her husband’s return, so the 
girlish fingers upon the loom had wrought 
the transcendent story to a finish. 

To a finish even to the sprinkling of gold 
pieces, the yellow bonanza, coming from 
somewhere, to gorge the Thunder Bird, 
for its record flight ; to a finish even to the 
celestial climax, the little blue powder-flash 
lighting up the dear, fair face of Mammy 
Moon ! 

But of one climax, more celestial still, 
Pemrose Lorry could not speak, not even 
to these her Camp Fire Sisters: of the 
evening of the second wreck the wreck 
of hope after that third installment of a 
disappointing will had been read ^when 
she had taken the four feet and a half 
of pearl poem to her father s workshop, 
the grim hardware laboratory, and out of 
the home of light, which she herself hardly 
understood, in her young, young heart, 


I82 


PEMROSE LORRY 


had told him, doubtful of the future, that 
she knew the invention would win out — 
the Thunder Bird go where nothing earthly 
had ever gone before. 

And he had whispered something — 
something surpassing — about a Wise 
Woman who saved a city. 

It made sacred every thought now, and 
humbled it, too, in the breast of this little 
sixteen-year-old girl, with the mingled yarn 
in her nature — the mingling spice in her 
name. 

Others had these fair stoles, too, the 
history of their girlish lives woven in pearls 
of typical purity, crossed by vivid repre- 
sentations of events. Drooping to their 
knees, in symbolic beauty, finishing with 
the soft leather fringes on which a breeze 
sweeping down the wide chimney played, 
they flashed here and there in the high 
colors of adventure — the quaintly sym- 
bolized adventure tale. 

Rut none could match the theme of the 
two little primitive figures upon the moun- 


THE COUNCIL FIRE 183 

tain-top, the inventor looking through a 
tube, the comet-like streak of fire above 
them: the opening of a highroad through 
Space, — the first step towards a federation 
of the heavenly bodies. 

The record to go down to posterity ! 

Yet old Earth had still her individual 
romance of seedtime and harvest, sun 
and storm, peril and deliverance. 

Emblematically depicted these were in 
the pearl strip of a girl, with a winsome 
reflection of Andrew’s thistle-burr in her 
speech. Born “far awa’ in bonnie Scot- 
land”, the thistle and America’s goldenrod 
blent their purple and gold upon her 
young shoulders ; there was an idealized 
plow, representing the peaceful agricul- 
tural calling of her father, — and a jump 
from peace to peril in the primitively 
symbolized scene of a shipwreck through 
which she had been with him when crossing 
the Atlantic in a sailing vessel. 

“We had all to take to the boats, you 
see,” said Jennie Mclvor, “for the ship 


PEMROSE LORRY 


184 

was leaking so badly that she couldn’t 
keep afloat but a wee bit longer ; and we 
had a verra rough time until we were picked 
up.” 

A rough time, indeed, typified by the 
wildly driven little canoes — the most 
primitive form of the boat — tossed upon 
stiff water-hills, brooding above them the 
quaint, corkscrew figure, with the eye in 
its head, of Ta-te, the tempest. 

Somehow, this eye — the spying wind’s 
eye — haunted Pemrose that night, curled 
up in a previous suggestion of the Guard- 
ian’s which, momentarily, had twisted it- 
self, snake-like, around her heart. 

Suppose Ta-te should prove cruel to her, 
as to Jennie whom she had eventually 
spared ! Suppose, on the great night of 
the first experiment with Toandoah’s little 
rocket, Ta-te, jealous of a rival in the small 
Thunder Bird which could out-soar all the 
winds of Earth — out-soar even the air, 
their cradle — should meanly seize upon 
the black, silk parachute, light as soot. 


THE COUNCIL FIRE 185 

anchored to the golden egg, the little 
recording apparatus ! Suppose it should 
whirl both off, away from the eager hands 
stretched out to claim them, hide them in a 
dark recess of the mountain side, maybe, 
where they could not be found for days, — 
possibly never ! 

Ta-te could play fast and loose with her 
father’s reputation, she knew ; at least, with 
the witness to his success as an inventor. 

‘‘ If the wind should do that,” she thought, 
''then the World, some part of it — the 
horrid World — will say that Mr. Hartley 
Graham’s last thoughts about that mile- 
long will were wise ones : that it was better 

— better to leave all that money 'hung 
up’ awaiting the possible return of that 
madcap younger brother — who ’ll make 
ducks and drakes of it, most likely — than 

— than to turn it over to a Thunder Bird,” 
with a faint flash of a smile, "in spite, oh ! 
in spite of the fact that daring volunteers 

— skilled aviators — are wild to take pas- 
sage in the far-flying Bird.” 


1 86 


PEMROSE LORRY 


Yes ! even that youthful hotspur who 
used the cream of rough-edged paper, and 
was willing to try anything once, though 
it should be once for all. 

The girl’s thought reverted to him now 
as she gazed into the bungalow fire, seeing 
in the gusty flicker of every log that men- 
acing spiral, — the brooding wind’s eye. 

It claimed her, that wild, red eye, even 
while her companions of the White Birch 
Group were excitedly discussing their pic- 
turesque plans for the morrow ; for the 
celebration of their annual festival in honor 
of the birch trees bursting into leaf, for the 
odes, the songs, the dances, the planting, 
each, of a silvery sapling. 

It mesmerized her, did Ta-te’s eye, with 
its setting of flame, even to the exclusion 
of enthusiasm about the big dance — the 
joyous Together — in the evening, of which 
Una raved in anticipation now and again, 
and for which these two friends and rivals 
in the matter of eyelashes had brought 
their prettiest party dresses. 


THE COUNCIL FIRE 187 

The elders presiding over the destinies 
of both had given a happy consent to Tan- 
pa’s invitation, and the two were now the 
guests for a few days of the mountain 
Group at their camp on the egg-shaped 
Bowl. 

The sigh of the mountain breeze came 
soothingly across the lake to lull their 
slumbers as they lay down to rest, side by 
side, in the little bungalow cots of which a 
dozen ranged the length of the great water- 
side dormitory half-open, half-screened. 

Yet Pern fell asleep imploring Ta-Te — 
and lost the little record altogether in her 
dreams ! 

Up and down old Greylock she plodded, 
looking for it, hand in hand with Toan- 
doah, — but ever it eluded them ! 

Muttering, bereft, she tossed ; then for a 
moment awoke, blinkingly sat up, to see 
the moonlight flickering — Mammy Moon’s 
own smile — upon the pearl-woven proph- 
ecy beside her, from which she could 
hardly be parted by night or day. 


i88 


PEMROSE LORRY 


Sleep again ! And now it was not only 
the diary but the Thunder Bird, itself, 
that was lost, — astray in space, and she 
with it ! 

She was trying to catch it by the fiery 
tail-feathers when, all of a sudden — all 
of a sober sudden — those feathers became 
soft, flopping, buffeting, — real. 

They brushed her parted lips. They 
flopped against her cheek. They even 
niopped the dews of slumber from her 
eyes. 

‘^Hea-vens ! W-what is i't-t ?’* 

Wildly she sat up — a second time — 
to see the dawn poking at her with a pink 
finger and the lake shimmering without, 
a great pearl found by the morning in an 
iridescent oyster-shell of mist. 

And, within, a bumping, buffeting some- 
thing, soft as moss, dun-gray as terror — 
blundering into every sleeper’s face, as if 
testing its warmth, bowling its way along 
the line of cots. 

‘‘Cluck ! Cluck ! Flutter ! Flutter ! Awake ! 


THE COUNCIL FIRE 189 

Awake! Pm lost I I’m lost!” it said. 

“What is it? What is itV 

Never was such an exciting reveille as 
girl by girl bounded up — elastic — finger- 
ing a brushed, a tickled cheek. 

The answer was a screech that made the 
morning blush, as if a ghost had invaded 
the Tom Tiddler’s ground of open day 
light. 

Una shrieked in echo. 

Morale was undermined. Cots were va- 
cated. Maiden jostled maiden, all colliding 
upon a gaping question that fanned sensa- 
tion sky-high — until the bungalow fairly 
rocked upon a hullabaloo. 


CHAPTER XVII 
A Novel Santa Claus 
an Owl!’’ 

‘‘Only an owl — a little screech owl! 
Not — not so little, either ! Where did it 
come from ?” 

“Yes! How on earth did it get in? 
Doors — windows — all are screened.” 

“Glory halleluiah! It came down the 
chimney. Look — look at the black on 
its feathers, the wood-smuts clinging to it ! 
Down the big chimney of the living room !” 

“Like Santa Claus down the chimney! 
Mercy! d’you suppose it played Santa 
itself? or did the boys pushiit down ?” 

“The boys ! Those miserable Henkyl 
Hunters — always on the trail of a joke ! 
If they did, they ’ll never own up ! 
Never!” 


A NOVEL SANTA CLAUS 191 

Such was the substance of the uproar 
as the downy ball of mopping feathers 
took on a beak, claws and big brown eyes, 
blank and round, perching upon the foot- 
rail of a cot ! 

“Oh! it’s as bad as the bats in Tory 
Cave. And they were so-o hor-rid 1” 
wailed Una. “It — it just tickled my 
lips with its wing. Bah 1” 

“Bad 1 It ’s not bad, at all ; it ’s dear,” 
cooed Jessie, the merle, feeling instant 
kinship with the bewildered bird. “Girls! 
Girls ! I believe it ’s blind — blind as a 
bat, or as the pale fish in the cave. There 
it goes — look — knocking its head, this 
way and that, against the wall!” 

Yes, the fluttering thing, of a sudden 
taking to flight again, was now playing 
shuttlecock, feathered shuttlecock, to the 
battledore of a broad sunbeam which 
batted it wildly hither and yon. 

“Oh ! keep back — quiet — maybe, ’t will 
settle down again,” pleaded the merle. 

“Hasn’t it the face of a cunning little 


192 


PEMROSE LORRY 


kitten ? Such a wise, blinking, round-eyed 
kitten ! Its head is reddish, not gray — 
and the rufous markings on its breast, too ! 
Oh-h ! I wonder if the boys did catch it 
in the woods and thought it was a good 
^henkyl’ to put down our chimney?’’ 

But that, as the girls knew, would remain 
as blind a puzzle as the long, screened 
dormitory was to the dazzled owl, unable 
to see clearly in daylight, out visiting when 
he should have been in bed in the cool, 
dark hollow of a tree. 

^^Oo-oo-oo-ooo . . . cluck!” it cooed 
and grumbled, pressing a dappled breast 
and wide-spread wings against a screen, 
the mottled back-feathers ruffling into a 
huge breeze-swept pompon. 

^‘See ! He ’s playing he ’s a big owl.” 

^^Oh! I wonder if he’d let me — let 
me catch him.” Jessie sighed yearningly. 

^‘Do-o, and we’ll tame him — keep him for 
a mascot !” It was a general acclamation. 

And the feathered Santa, apparently 
having no objection to this role — finding 


A NOVEL SANTA CLAUS 193 

himself no longer a waif in Babel — finally 
settled down again on the glittering head- 
rail of Una’s cot, his fluffy breast to the 
outdoor sunlight, his solemn, kittenish face 
— the head turning round on a pivot 
without the movement of a muscle in the 
body — confronting sagely the delighted 
girls. 

Isn’t he the dearest thing? Oh! I ’m 
glad the boys played the trick — if it was 
the boys. I ’d rather think he played 
Santa himself.” 

There was no inkling in Jessie’s mind, 
as, so murmuring and softly barefoot, she 
stole up to the visitor, now motionless as a 
painted bird, of a much worse trick that 
those freakish Henkyl Hunters might play, 
a girl abetting them, too — shocking fact — 
before night fell again upon the pearly Bowl. 

"‘Oo-oo-ooo! Boo! See me reverse!” 
It seemed to be what the owl was saying 
to the maidens as he turned the tables on 
them again and again with that teetotum 
trick of his swivel neck. 


194 


PEMROSE LORRY 


But he did not scream any more or 
offer the least objection when the merle took 
him to her tender breast, cooing reassurance. 

There ! you Ve got a new singing 
teacher, Jess — a little screech owl. Little ! 
My ! he ’s big for a small-eared owl, isn’t 
he ? — nearly a foot long. Brush the camou- 
flage off him — the smuts of the chimney !” 

“Well — well, whether he enacted Santa 
Claus of his own accord, or whether he 
didn’t — ” thus Tanpa broke in on the 
last flow of speech which was a medley — 
“he’s brought us one gift, anyway, the 
gift of a glorious day for our annual White 
Birch celebration.” 

It did prove a banner day, from the 
breakfast out of doors on the wide piazza 
in that matchless warmth of early summer 
when buds are bursting, trees singing them- 
selves into leaf — for “all deep things are 
song—” when the inquisitive breeze peeps 
longingly into the yellow heart of the first 
wild rose and May is bourgeoning, flower- 
ing, into the joy of June. 


A NOVEL SANTA CLAUS 195 

Below the bungalow the three-mile lake, 
a mile and a half across — the trans- 
figured Bowl — was still a softly glowing 
pearl, treasured in cotton-wool mists which 
entirely hid its real framing of lofty hills. 

‘‘When the mountains cease playing 
blindman’s buff with each other, then — 
then it will be time for our morning swim, 
won’t it ? The first real swim of the season, 
too,” murmured Tomoke, the signaling 
maiden, nestling coaxingly near to the pre- 
siding Guardian. 

“Yes, if you think the water will be 
warm enough.” 

“Oh ! it was quite warm yesterday when 
we paddled but around the float — the 
floating pier,” Jessie, who was tempting 
the feathered Santa Claus, pampered cap- 
tive under her arm, with every tidbit she 
could think of, from cereal to lake-cod 
caught by the girls themselves, looked down 
at that buoyant pier — a golden raft, at 
the moment — tossing a dozen yards from 
the base of a fifteen-foot cliff where the 


PEMROSE LORRY 


196 

shore jumped sharply down to the water. 
Yesterday it had been wreathed with 
boughs for the coming festival : the swim- 
ming structure, naively composed of two 
great barrels, boarded over, with a broad 
plank, as a bridge, running out ashore. 

To it a couple of shining canoes and two 
broad camp boats were moored ; it also 
served as a springboard for diving. ' 

Built by girl-carpenters themselves — 
with a little masculine help — presently 
to be garlanded with daisy-chains and 
buttercups, for the June carnival, and to 
hide its crudity, it stood, so the Guardian 
thought, exquisitely for the practical and 
the poetic in Camp Fire life, which ever in 
^‘glorifying Work’’ seeks Beauty! 

The sun was seeking that too, just now, 
gloating over his own noble reflection in the 
green-lipped Bowl, — benevolently promis- 
ing, indeed, a day hot for the season, as 
well as radiant. 

“Yes! the temperature has taken a leap 
ahead,” said Tanpa musingly. “I think 


A NOVEL SANTA CLAUS 197 

you can go in — for a short swim, any 
way. ” 

"‘Notify me — notify me if you see me 
drowning — for I can’t hear the voice of 
doom through my bathing cap!” laughed 
Una Grosvenor, two hours later, in conse- 
quence of this permission, wading coyly 
out beyond the float, to where the lake- 
water rose over the crossed logs of the 
Camp Fire emblem on the breast of her 
blue bathing suit. 

“Oh! she ’s in no danger of drowning; 
she swims better than I — I do-o now,” 
shivered Pemrose, rather wishing that June 
were July and the Bowl had undergone the 
gradual glow of a heating process. “Aren’t 
you coming, Thrush ?” she cried. “Aren’t 
you coming in, Jessie ? ” 

“I can’t leave the owl! I believe the 
boys meant him as an anniversary present 
— though they went about presenting him 
in a queer way,” was the fostering answer. 

The other girls, however, were in the 
water, as those grigs of boys had been 


PEMROSE LORRY 


198 

before them; the Bowl seemed to froth 
with their laughter, spray creaming around 
the bare, sunflushed arms flung above it, 
as if the lake itself, in festive mood, were a 
sentient sharer in the joy of these daring 
June bathers, 

^‘Now — now who wants to dress and 
come out in the boats for a study of pond- 
life under the microscope?” cried the 
Guardian. 

‘‘Whoo! Whoo ! That — thaPs a bait 
to which the fish always rise,” cried one and 
another, eagerly splashing ashore blue 
of brow and covered with gooseflesh, yet 
loath to admit that on this the feathered 
Santa Claus’ gift of a prematurely perfect 
June day the creamy Bowl was still too 
emphatically a cooler. 

Up the rude sod steps of the cliff they 
trooped — a bevy of shivers — fleeing for 
warmth and the shelter of the bungalow. 

*‘Oo-oo-oo ! I Ve never been in bathing 
so early in the year before,” shook out 
Pemrose, to whom the experience — the 


A NOVEL SANTA CLAUS 199 


lingering chill of this mountain Bowl many 
hundred feet above sea-level — was rather 
too much of a weak parody upon her last 
freshwater ducking. 

‘‘Oh! you’ll soon warm up. Come, 
hurry and dress 1 It’s no end of fun study- 
ing water-snails and egg-boats gnats 
funny egg-boats — under a microscope, with 
the Scoutmaster,” encouraged Tomoke, in 
everyday life Ina Atwood, blue as her 
lightning namesake, and rather hanker- 
ing after the warmth of her pine-knot 
torch. 

“ Ye-es ; and — and minnows — where 
every one of them is is a chief Triton 
among the minnows 1 laughed another 
girl, scrambling into her clothes. Mean- 
ing no minnows, at all — all-11 Tritons ! 

All Tritons, sure enough, rosy Tritons, 
brilliant now in the early summer, the 
breeding season, with wonderful colors, the 
males, especially. 

Swimming about, near the surface, as the 
minnows usually do, the clear waters of the 


200 


PEMROSE LORRY 


June Bowl became for the girls, looking, 
one by one through the large microscope 
over the boat’s side, a vasty deep” in 
which leviathans played — fairy fish — see- 
ing everything rose-color, painting them- 
selves to ecstasy with the joys of mating, 
the joy of June. 

See — see they ’re not all red — or 
partly so — s-such a lovely pinky-red, espe- 
cially around the fins and head — that ’s 
where they keep their pigment,” said 
Tanpa. ‘‘Some have colored themselves 
like goldfish ; others are greenish — or lighter 
yellow.” 

“Ha! While others, again, are gotten 
up as if for a minstrel show for their mar- 
riage — painted black, for the time being I” 
laughed her husband, the tall Scout Officer. 

“Yes. That ’s why we like, girls and 
boys, to come down to our camp early in 
the season — if only at intervals — because 
we watch the summer coming and can study 
the wonderful lake life as at no other time,” 
remarked the Guardian again, and then 


A NOVEL SANTA CLAUS 201 

subsided into private life in the stern of the 
broad, red camp-skiff, scribbling something 
in verse form to be read at the White Birch 
celebration in the afternoon when land as 
well as lake was a-riot with young colot, 
strewn with wild flowers for gay June to 
tread on. 

“ Oh ! isn’t it the most wonderful — 
wonderful season ? In the city we go 
camping too late. The freshness isn’t 
there.” Pern’s eyes were dim as she ap- 
plied one to the lens, of the microscope, to 
gaze once more at the painted Tritons ; 
she was glad that In the freshness of the 
year it was — oh ! so soon now that the 
little Thunder Bird would momentarily 
color the skies and paint the World rose- 
colored in excitement over its demonstra- 
tion — over the heights that could be 
reached — paving the way for the Triton 
of Tritons to come. 

*‘Well! if we spend any more time with 
the minnows, we ’ll have to ‘cut out’ the 
‘fresh-water sheep’, the little roaches, and 


202 


PEMROSE LORRY 


the insects' egg-boats, " said the Scout- 
master. “Speaking of the latter, I saw a 
curious one yesterday upon a stagnant 
pool over on the other side of the lake ; 
perhaps the visitors would be interested in 
it." 

The visitors were interested in the bare 
mention. Warming equally to comfort and 
excitement again, they clamored — Pern- 
rose and Una — for a sight of that raft 
of gnats' eggs, so cunningly formed and 
glued together, minute egg to egg, hundreds 
of them, that it was a regular lifeboat — 
no storm could sink it, and pressure only 
temporarily. 

Yet, after all, Pemrose only half heard 
the Scoutmaster's explanation of how the 
insect chose a floating stick or straw as a 
nucleus, placed her forelegs on it and laid 
the egg upon her hind ones, holding it there 
until she had brought forth another to join 
it, gluing the two together by their sticky 
coating, and so on till the broad and 
buoyant boat was constructed ! 


A NOVEL SANTA CLAUS 203 

Pemrose hardly heard, for as the party 
made its way to that stagnant pool, an over- 
flow at some time of the sparkling Bowl, 
and hidden in a dense little wood, she had 
a sudden demonstration of how, under 
certain circumstances, a girl’s heart is 
much more capsizable than a gnat’s egg- 
boat. 

Hers positively turned turtle — yes ! 
really, turned turtle — at sight oiF a long, 
gray figure lying, breast down, amid under- 
growth upon the margin of a little stream 
that was hurrying away from it to_the 
lake. 

She felt momentarily topsy-turvy, every 
bit of her, for anywhere on earth — aye, 
even if she were scouring space with the 
Thunder Bird — she would recognize that 
angular figure. 

It had once pulled her up a snow-bank 
to the distant rumble of an engine’s explo- 
sion. 

Yes, and surely she had seen it again, 
once again, since then — although, sand- 


PEMROSE LORRY 


204 

wiched as it now was between egg-boats 
and painted Tritons she could not — for 
the moment — remember where. 

‘‘ Fine day ! Having luck ? Catching 
anything?’’ hailed the Scoutmaster, with 
genial interest, as one woodsman to another, 
for the figure was angling with a fly-rod. 

The latter shot a side long glance at the 
party from under a broad Panama hat, — 
then jammed that, rather uncivilly, further 
down upon his head. 

Bah ! The fish aren’t ex-act-Iy jump- 
ing out of the water, saying ‘Hullo!’ to 
you!” it returned in the freakish drawl of 
a masked battery, shrinking deeper into 
cover amid the ferns. 

Yet, when the Nature students had 
passed on, one quivering girl, with ears 
intently on the alert, heard it fire off some- 
thing in the same fern-cloaked rumble 
about a certain fly being a “perfect peach” 
to fish with. 

And the answer came in clear, ringing, 
boyish tones — from another angler pre- 


A NOVEL SANTA CLAUS 205 

sumably — momentarily rainbowing the 
wood. 

‘‘Yes — sure — that Parmachene belle 
is the girl^ Dad ! If — if there’s a trout in 
the stream, she’ll put the ‘come hither!’ 
on it.” 

“Bah! Likening a trout-fly to a girl! 
So like his ‘nickum’ impudence!” Pern’s 
teeth — in her present mood — came to- 
gether with a snap. And, of course, she 
couldn’t see the gnat’s raft when she ar- 
rived at the stagnant puddle, for she had 
borrowed the gnat’s sting with which to 
barb the snub which she meant to inflict, 
some time, upon that angling youth who 
had sat, unabashed, in the Devil’s Chair, — 
if ever luck held out a chance. 

“Yes — yes! and if he had played Jack 
at a Pinch forty-eleven million times, I’d 
do it.” Her eyes were flashing now like 
the sky-dots in the pool, forked by iri- 
descent shadows. “So — so here^s where 
they have their camp,” craning her neck 
for a glimpse of a log-cabin amid the 


2o6 


PEMROSE LORRY 


spruces. ^‘Stud said it was just across 
the lake from the girls’ !” 

After that — well ! who could be inter- 
ested in gnat-boats when they had just 
lit upon the ambush of a Puzzle ; a puzzle 
that would only open in a pinch and shut 
up, like a Chinese ring-box, afterwards ? 

And, moreover, that woodland lurking- 
place was just a bare mile and a half across 
the Bowl from the floating barrel pier, 
decked, as it was built, by girls’ hands, and 
from the great heart’s-ease bungalow, now, 
too, in process of decoration for the gala 
time in the afternoon around the White 
Birch totem ; and for the blissful, far-off 
event, drawing nearer with every shining 
moment, the brilliant piazza dance in the 
evening ! 


CHAPTER XVIII 

Reprisals 

“Her tunic is of silver, 

Her veil of green tree-hair, 

The woodland Princess donning 
Her pomp of summer wear. 

White arms to heaven reaching. 
Shy buds that, tiptoe, meet 

The kiss of June’s awaking. 

The season’s hast’ning feet ! 

Oh, sure, a laugh is lisping 
In each uncurling leaf ; 

The joy of June is thrilling 
Some sense to transport brief! 

Sister of mine. White Birch Tree 1 
That sense my own sets free. 

For in thy dim soul-stirrings 
My Father speaks to me.” 


208 


PEMROSE LORRY 


It was Tanpa, with the sunburst upon 
her right breast, general symbol of the 
Camp Fire, and the birch tree in grace 
of green and silver embroidered above 
it upon emerald khaki, who read the 
verses which she had scribbled in the 
skiff’s stern under cover of the general 
interest in water-snails, eggboats and 
‘‘fresh-water sheep.” 

“Most beautiful of forest trees’ — the 
Lady of the Woods!” came the respon- 
sive hail from eighteen green-clad maidens, 
tiptoeing around the Silver Lady, the 
emerald tassels of their Tam-o’-shanters 
skipping in the June breeze that peeped 
under her fluttering veil, still tucked with 
buds, to kiss those white limbs lifted to 
the skies, with surely, some bud of con- 
scious joy. 

It was June 1 Upon the cliff-brow, above 
the lake, wild roses were budding, too ; 
and the girls’ cheeks painted themselves 
with their reflection — even as did the 
blushing minnows in the lake. 


REPRISALS 


209 

But the lady of the woods had the 
best of it so far as decoration went. Never 
new-crowned head wore in its coronet 
Life as hers did, — fledgling life. 

For amid the heart-shaped leaves, so 
brightly green, was the cap-sheaf of sum- 
mer wear : 

“A nest of robins in her hair.” 

The poet who penned that line would 
have gloried in the sight of her, that bun- 
galow birch tree, a tall, straight specimen, 
radiant as a silver taper from the black, 
frescoed ring about the foot to the top- 
most ivory twig, and here and there 
amid the fluttering, pea-green tresses a 
little tuft of Conscious life — a nestling 
with _ open beak and craving, coralline 
throat. 

He would have joyed in the sight of the 
tree-loving Group, too, as the earth was 
turned and the first silver sapling rooted 
deep to the music of Tomoke’s voice, 
softly proclaiming : 


210 


PEMROSE LORRY 


‘‘He who plants a tree, * 

He plants love. 

Tents of coolness spreading out above 
Wayfarers he may not live to see. 

Gifts that grow are best, 

Hands that bless are blest. 

Plant ! Life does the rest.’’ 

And Life would do the rest — oh ! surely 

— in the case of her father and herself, 
was the dewy thought of Pemr’ose Lorry 
as she planted her baby tree in honor of 
that novel Wayfarer, that would first 
traverse space and conquer it — bridge 
the gulf which made Earth a hermit amid 
the heavenly bodies — of the great in- 
vention, whereof poets in future ages 
would sing, that daringly took the first 
step towards linking planet with planet. 

And the tender sapling was rooted in 
the hope that long before it was a mature 
tree that comet-like Wayfarer would start, 

— the Thunder Bird would fly. 

Well ! star-dust never blinded the eyes. 
But it certainly dazzled those of Pern- 


REPRISALS 


2II 


rose, that young visionary, as she pressed 
earth around her sapling’s root : would 
there ever come a time when the Camp 
Fires of Earth would hail the Camp Fires 
of some other planet across that illimitable 
No Man’s Land of Space, first — oh ! 
thought transcendent — first bridged by 
her father’s genius ? 

But with the high seasoning of that 
thought came the salty smack of another ! 
All unseen in the planting excitement a 
tear dropped upon the spading trowel as 
she thought of that whimsical ‘‘Get thee 
behind me, Satan, but don’t push!” plea 
of the inventor sorely tempted to commer- 
cialize his genius, thwart its inspired range, 
because of the difficulties about bringing 
his project to fruition — and of that money 
hung up, idle, for the next twelve years. 

“Daddy-man thinks he ’ll be — well I 
not an old man, but that his best energies 
will be spent by that time, even if — ” 

But here the trowel dug vigorously, 
burying head over ears the thought of 


212 


PEMROSE LORRY 


the possible return within that time of the 
‘‘zany’’ who had been such a mad fellow 
in youth that, according to her father 
and others, it was like sitting on 
a barrel of gunpowder to have 
anything to do with him, so sure 
were you to come to grief through 
his explosive pranks. And yet, and 
yet — perhaps it was the dash of 
spice in her name — Pern could not 
help feeling an interest for his own sake 
in that ‘‘hot tamale”, the Thunder Bird’s 
rival in the will ! 

So she spaded away, watering her sap- 
ling for the first time, herself, with that 
little tributary tear ; and then, propi- 
tiating it, after the manner of the Indians, 
in the graceful Leaf Dance, capering 
around it, around the Queen Birch, too, 
with her companions, upon the lightest 
fantastic toe, their green arms outstretched 
and waving, to imitate the leaves above 
them, blown by the wind. 

Went the phonograph upon the bunga- 


REPRISALS 


213 





• r~« m p 

0 ^ 1 LJ 







> /T\ 



d I' Li ■ — It- "" 


Repeat 4. times 


low piazza, as it threw off the music, the 
quaint Indian accompaniment to those 
stamping, shuffling, skipping feet, to the 
queer little half-savage syllables, bor- 
rowed from the Creek Indians, upon the 
lips of the chanting, dancing girls, to 
the coconut hand-rattle wielded by Aponi, 
the Butterfly, most fairy-like of the green 
dancers, as she led and led, in honor of 
the new idlwissi, or tree-hair, the listen- 
ing leaves — ethereal partners overhead. 

Containing little pebbles picked from 
the lake-side, with a stick running through 



214 


PEMROSE LORRY 


the painted coconut-shell for a handle, 
its gleeful rattle fairly turned .girls’ heads 
with the joy of June. 

“I think we’ll have to ask you to re- 
peat that dance to-night for the benefit 
of the boys, your guests,” said the Scout- 
master, who was manipulating the phono- 
graph. ‘‘Fairyland wouldn’t be ‘in it’ 
with the human leaves tripping in pink 
and gold and green and — no ordinary 
man knows what !” 

Fairyland, indeed, seemed beaten hollow 
as “across the lake in golden glory” the 
waning sunbeams of early June bathed 
the little floating pier, wreathed in laurel 
and daisy chains, then climbed with flag- 
ging feet, like a tired angel, the sod-steps 
cut into the side of the steep cliff, and, 
gaining the top, joined their rose-colored 
brothers skipping among girlish forms 
in every fair hue imaginable, claiming 
partners in a dance as of Northern Lights 
before ever their human brothers, the scouts 
in gilded khaki, got a chance at a reel. 


REPRISALS 215 

''Oh! I feel it in my toes that this is 
going to be a won-der-ful party,” said 
Toandoah’s little pal, kicking lightly, im- 
patiently with those satin toes of her 
party slippers at the tufted grass, as she 
sat enthroned upon the sod of the cliff’s 
brow, with two knights beside her. Stud 
of the stout heart, and a bright-eyed 
luckless tenderfoot, whose parents, in a 
fit of dementia surely, had named him 
Louis Philip Green, which, as he used only 
the initial letter of his second name, had 
of course entailed a nickname. 

"You promised you ’d dance the 
Lancers with me, although I ’m only a 
tenderfoot,” said Peagreen, nibbling a 
blade of grass as he lay prone upon the 
sod and shooting a glance, bright and 
eager as a robin’s, in the direction of the 
black-haired girl with those skybeams in 
her eyes under inky lashes. 

"Humph ! TheYheek of some kids who 
ought to be tucked up in their Beehive 
when — when that dance comes off!” 


2I6 


PEMROSE LORRY 


grumbled the fifteen-year-old Stud, with 
the arrogance of a Patrol Leader, direct- 
ing his glance at a brown, conical bunga- 
low flanking a large one, where the younger 
boys turned in at what seemed to them 
unseemly hours, while scout veterans sat 
up overhauling the day’s doings for an 
occasion of a laugh against somebody, 
practical joke, of course, preferred, to be 
published in the Henkyl Hunter’s type- 
written Bulletin and hung up in the porch 
next mourning. 

“Well ! I ’m safe for the Grand March, 
anyhow — and the Virginia reel, too, eh!” 
Stud dug congratulatory fists into his 
brown sides, wriggling aggressively upon 
the cliff-brow, like Peagreen figuratively 
hugging the ground with an impatient 
nose. 

Privately he was inclined to the opinion 
that the blue-eyed girl’s friend who had 
that little nearsighted stand in one of 
her dark eyes, and two dimples to Pern- 
rose’s one, was the daintier “peach” of 


REPRISALS 


217 


the two — and that his own sister, Jess, 
was as pretty as either ; but think of the 
distinction of leading off with a girl whose 
father would lead off amid the dance of 
planets, in sending a messenger to the 
moon. Mars, too, maybe ! 

‘‘Whoopee He kicked the sod as 
if spurning it as common or garden earth 

— although there were moments when, 
like others — elders — in a skeptical world, 
he told himself that the Thunder Bird 
would prove, after all, a Flying Dutchman, 

— just an extravagant dream. 

‘^So — so you were out on the lake 
this morning, studying pond life with the 
professor,” he said, alluding to the Scout- 
master. “He’s instructor in a college 
and each year he gets us started on some- 
thing; last summer it was astronomy — 
he brought a small telescope along.” 

Pern’s heels drummed more excitedly 
on the sod — the starry heavens were her 
scope. 

“But we have a good deal of fun with 


2i8 


PEMROSE LORRY 


the big compound microscope, too — and 
more without it,” acknowledged Studley. 
‘'Fancy last week we caught a huge pike 
which had jumped clear out of the water, 
on to the bank, after a water-hen !” 

“Where was that ? How — how big 
was it?” The girlish questions mounted 
helter-skelter. 

“The pike ? Oh ! he weighed about 
fifteen pounds. It was right over there, 
on the other side of the lake,” pointing 
to the spot where the party interested 
in egg-boats had landed that morning. 
“He — he gobbled the hen, too.” 

“Z)zW he?” But he might have been 
threatening to gobble her, judging by the 
start which the girl gave at the moment. 

Her heart jumped down to the water’s 
edge as abruptly as did the cliff beneath 
her. 

Her eyes were on a boat rowing out of 
the sunset’s eye directly across the lake 
from that very spot. 

There was but one individual in it and 


REPRISALS 


219 


he — he was rowing by instinct, as the 
birds fly, for his gaze was glued to a news- 
paper sheet, the sun’s own evening edition, 
gorgeously printed by the painted rays 
in every hue of the spectrum. 

He was heading straight — straight for 
the floating wharf with its plank-bridge 
running out ashore. 

Jack at a Pinch again ! 

‘‘Do — do you know who he is?” Pern 
flashed the question upon the older of 
her two boy-knights. 

Well-11! I guess so.” Stud’s joy In 
the recognition floundered a little. 

— ^ he ’s the fellow — one of the fellows 
— who boomed the aeroplane, the other 
day, to get you girls quietly out of the 
cave, when there was a ^rattler — ’” 

^^As if we ’d have made a fuss, any- 
how!” The girl’s eyes blazed, again a 
patchwork, drawing their red center from 
the sun. ‘‘You said — you said that it 
was so hard to make friends with him, 
like whistling jigs to a milestone — ah ! ” 


220 


PEMROSE LORRY 


Her own voice was suddenly stony. 
‘^Have you — oh! have you made any 
headway since 

‘‘Humph! Yes. I Ve found out some- 
thing about him.” 

The patrol leader’s preoccupied eyes 
were on the boat edging vaguely nearer 
to the wharf, with its one “nickum” 
figure, so nonchalantly rowing, so absorbed 
in the rainbowed sheet upon its knees 
that at this moment it awkwardly 
“caught a crab” and almost suggestively 
lost an oar. 

Simultaneously, however, the phono- 
graph on the piazza struck up, as a pre- 
lude to festivities, the Virginia reel, the 
notes tripping gaily out across the painted 
lake ; and the rower shot one glance up- 
ward, as if to say : “I ’ll be there in time !” 
then bent his hungry nose to the paper 
again. 

“What — what did you find out about 
him ?” Pern’s interest was equally hungry 
— positively famishing. “ His name — eh ?” 


REPRISALS 


221 


— that’s the question! Over on 
Greylock the farmers’sons call him ‘Shoot- 
ing Star, alias ‘Starry V’ with a boyish 
laugh, “because when they were awfly 
hard up for a player in the last ball game 
of the series against Willard College, having 
lost their second baseman and substitute 
too, by gracious 1 he breezed along, an’ the 
captain, hearing he had played on a college 
team, roped him in . . . an’ — an’, what 
do you know, but he won the game for 
that mountain team with a home run! 
A home run over the left field fence ! 
Bully!” 

“But, surely, they know his — real — 
name!” Pern’s aloof absorption in that 
fell like fog-drip even upon the glow from 
that left field fence. 

“Maybe they do — and maybe they 
don’t ! He refused it to the fans. And 
when the Greylock coach cornered him he 
palmed it off as Selkirk. But my cousin 
who’s pitcher on the team says in his 
opinion that was just ‘throwing a tub to a 


222 


PEMROSE LORRY 


whale’ — something fishy about it, see?” 
Stud winked. ''For 'Starry’ an’ his father 

— who ’s a queer fish, if ever there was 
one — had a camp then up on Greylock 
peak, and the postmaster in charge o’ 
the Greylock mail owned that he received 
letters for them addressed to another name 

— only he couldn’t — wouldn’t — give it 
away.” 

Pern’s hand suddenly smote her lips. 

Her wide eyes were no patchwork now. 
Stud had not thought that a girl’s eyes 
could be so blue. It almost gave him 
the "Willies”, their remote, peculiar sky- 
glow, as if afar — afar — they were seeing 
things. 

"What!” she gasped again, while that 
vivid glow faded, became bluish, blank, 
the tint of " Moonshine ” — of a strange, 
wild, nondescript dream. 

Moonshine that seemed flooding her 
whole being ! 

And yet — although she was a quick- 


REPRISALS 


223 


witted girl — it was too vague for her to 
draw from it one clear thought — only an 
uneasy, unreal, absolutely breathless feeling ! 

And then the queer, air-drawn sensa- 
tion as suddenly passed — and with it 
the blue moon which had momentarily 
turned her world to nothing — ‘‘shooed’’ 
off by a very real, very tangible, quite 
pressing apprehension : 

“He — he ’s not coming to the da-nce ?” 

She sprang up hurriedly, pointing to 
the boat below; to its one preoccupied 
figure, clad neither in rough sweater nor 
May-fly gaudiness, now, but, if the sun- 
set didn’t exaggerate, in a very becom- 
ing dark suit. 

“Humph! I don’t know! I guess he 
is ! Didn’t think he could pull it off for 
some reason or other — ” Stud’s shoulders 
were shrugged. “ But, maybe, he ’s found 
where there ’s a will there ’s a way.” 

“Why-y?” The girl’s lips were parted 
breathlessly, her foot involuntarily stamp- 
ing. 


224 PEMROSE LORRY 

‘‘ Oh ! you know you told us to invite 
our friends to the party ; not you, but the 
other girls did, when they signaled across 
that night from the green Pinnacle — 
gee! and it was some signaling, too.” 
The scout’s glance was teasing now as 
it shot up from the grass. ‘‘ So — so 
one of the older boys he ran across that 
bunch o’ fellows who were blooming round 
in the cave the other day — they ’re all 
from camps on the lake — and invited the 
whole five. This one thought he couldn’t 
accept, but I guess he ’s making a dash 
at it — at coming just the same I” 

‘‘Oh! ... Oh, dear! I wish he 
wasn’t !” 

“Why?” Now it was the scout’s turn 
to hang, breathless, upon the interroga- 
tion as he too jumped to his feet. 

“ Because — oh ! because I ’d be — be 
ever so much more comfortable without 
him — enjoy myself more.” Pern caught 
her breath wildly. 

“Then ’twill be A. W. O. L. for him! 


REPRISALS 225 

. . . A. W. O. L. for him — if I perish 
for it !” 

“What — what does that mean ?” 

“Absent With-Out Leave, as they set 
it down in the Army !” 

Mischief leaped to the Henkyl Hunter’s 
eye. 

He beckoned Peagreen from the grass 
to follow him. A whisper in the tender- 
foot’s ear and down the winding sod- 
steps of the cliff they scrambled ! 

Pern knew that she ought to call them 
back; knew it from the white parting at 
the side of her throbbing little head to 
the toe of her satin slipper tumultuously 
beating the ground, as she sank down, an 
orchid amid her chiffons, to watch. 

But it was a moment when the spice of 
her chowchow name had all spilled over ; 
when the Vain Elf which, according to her 
father, slept in the shadow of the Wise Wo- 
man, was broadly — mutinously — awake. 

The boat had drawn in alongside the 
decked float now. 


226 


PEMROSE LORRY 


It was gently rocking there, on and off, 
the rower having shipped his oars and 
laid them beside him, his strong fingers 
now and again hooking the wharf when 
there was danger of his drifting away, 
while his obsessed nose was bent closer 
still to the newspaper sheet, catching the 
last rays of daylight on it. 

He did not look up when the scouts, 
running out over the plank bridge, spoke 
to him. 

Suddenly one of them — Stud it was — 
leaned down and snatched the oars, lifted 
them high in the air, the nickum’s evil 
genius having prompted him to lay them 
in the boat’s side nearest the wharf; per- 
haps it was the demon which he had dared 
by sitting in the Devil’s Chair. 

At the same time Peagreen gave the 
boat a strong shove outward to where a 
current caught it and swept it further — 
mockingly further, towards the darken- 
ing center of the Bowl. 

‘‘Oh ! I say — I say, you fellows, that ’j 


REPRISALS 


227 


no stunt to pull off!’’ roared the nickum 
wrathfully. “I ’m due at the dance now I” 

‘‘You ’re not coming to the dance. 
There ’s a girl here who doesn’t want 
you!” rang back the voice of callow chiv- 
alry in the barbarous pipe of the tender- 
foot. 

And Pern, slipping up from the grass, 
her hands to her burning cheeks — for 
she had not meant it to go as far as this 
— stole back to the piazza, to dance away 
from the shamefaced ecstasy of reprisal 
in her heart. 

Perhaps she would have felt that this 
was too sore a snub to inflict for any 
rudeness on Jack at a Pinch; perhaps 
she would have compelled her boy-knights 
to put out in the camp skiff and return 
those oars — under pain of not dancing 
with them, at all — had she seen the 
illuminated column over which the vic- 
tim’s nose had been so disastrously bent. 

It was in every sense a highly colored 
description of her father’s record-break- 


228 


PEMROSE LORRY 


ing invention, dwelling particularly, though 
vaguely, upon the experiments so soon 
to take place with a lesser Thunder Bird, 
a smaller rocket, from the remote and 
misty top of old Mount Greylock. 


CHAPTER XIX 
A Record Flight 

It had come at last, that starless night, 
that stupendous night of which Pemrose 
had dreamed for a year, as she perched 
on a laboratory stool and watched her 
father at work, when the little Thunder 
Bird, the smaller rocket, would take its 
experimenting flight, its preliminary canter, 
up a couple of hundred miles, or so, into 
the air, — and on into thin space. 

Most dashing explorer ever was, 
it would keep a diary, or log, of its flying 
trip. 

But whereas travelers, hitherto, had 
carried that up a sleeve or in a breast- 
pocket, it would have its journal in its 
cone-shaped head ; the little openwork 
box, five inches square, with the tape- 
like paper winding from one to another 
of the wheels within and the tiny pencil 
making shorthand markings, curve or dash, 
as the air pressed upon it, until it got 


230 


PEMROSE LORRY 


beyond the air-belt altogether — out into 
that bitter void of space, where pressure 
there was none. 

No wonder that the inventor called this 
log the golden egg, for when the magic 
Bird had flown its furthest, when all the 
little powder-rockets which, exploding 
successively, sent it on its way, were spent, 
then its dying scream would release the 
log from its bursting head. 

Back that would come, fluttering to 
earth on the wing of a sable parachute, 
lit on the way, as it drifted down two 
hundred miles, or so, by the glowworm 
gleam of a tiny electric battery, — a little 
dry cell attached to it ! 

And this, really, was, as Pemrose had 
said, the kernel of the present experi- 
ment to her father, the only witness to 
prove that the baby Thunder Bird had, 
indeed, “got there”, flown higher than 
anything earthly had ever ventured be- 
fore ; and that if a little two-footer in 
the shape of a sky-rocket had done so 


A RECORD FLIGHT 


231 


much, then there was nothing to prevent 
a twenty-foot steel Bird from flying on 
indefinitely, — even to Mammy Moon, 
herself, or fiery-eyed Mars, perhaps. 

‘‘I don’t believe that Dad has slept for 
two nights now, thinking about its safe 
return,” said Pemrose to Una, as in the 
starless, breeze-tickled night the two 
crouched together upon the mountain-top. 

“Well! that little firefly, the tiny elec- 
tric lamp — the ‘wee bit battery’, as An- 
drew calls it — • will guide us to finding 
it when it drifts down,” panted the other 
girl, excitement fixing that little peculiar 
stand, like a golden lamp, in her dark 
eye. 

“Yes, but — ” perhaps her dream in 
the bungalow of Ta-te, the tempest, was 
affecting Pemrose — “but suppose, oh! 
suppose, that the wind — there is a wind — 
should waft it away — away from us, 
down the mountainside, to where we 
couldn’t find it in the woods — dark 
woods — to where somebody, some hor- 


232 


PEMROSE LORRY 


rid meddler, might pick it up, and get a 
look at the Thunder Bird’s diary before 
us . . . the first record from so high up. 
Oh — dear!” 

The girl’s sigh was echoed by that 
stealthy wind around her, in whose every 
whisper there was menace, as it swept 
through the long grasses and ruffled the 
ash trees of Greylock’s summit. 

Una, to whom this "‘half the battle”, 
the quick locating of the parachute and 
its treasure, was not so vital, soared above 
all threat in this witching-time of excite- 
ment — the transcendent hour. 

“The Thiinder Bird’s diary! Oh-h ! 
the Thunder Bird’s diary,” she repeated 
dreamily, as if reciting a charm. 

Being Camp Fire Girls of fervid imag- 
ination, the supreme invention, the be- 
ginning of old Earth’s reaching out to the 
heavenly bodies, gained its crowning 
romance from them. 

As moment by moment flew by ro- 
mance in their young breasts became a 


A RECORD FLIGHT 


233 

sort of rhapsody that set every thought 
to wild music. 

To Pern it was as she had dreamed it 
would be, away back in her father’s lab- 
oratory, before the February train wreck. 

Hands seemed reaching out to her from 
everywhere, — she the satellite reflecting 
her father’s light. 

From the four quarters of the habitable 
earth eyes seeihed trained upon her, as 
she knelt in a little island of flashlight, 
with her thumb on an electric button 
which, connected by wires with a plat- 
form about a hundred feet away, would 
throw the switch and release the magic 
Bird to flying. 

^^N-now, keep cool. Pern! Don’t get 
excited — too ex-ci-ted — or-r you may 
miss the moment when they shout to you : 
‘ R-ready ! Shoot ! ’ ” breathed Una, so 
wrought up herself that her words had a 
sort of little zip, a hiss, in them, like the 
soft sighing of the breeze at the moment. 

Pemrose knew that her father’s thoughts 


PEMROSE LORRY 


234 

were taken up all the time with that sum- 
mit breeze, on how far it might affect the 
safe return of the golden egg, as he hovered 
about the low platform, a hundred feet 
away, on which the little Thunder Bird 
was mounted, together with his young 
assistant tightening up every bolt and 
screw for the record flight. A third tall 
figure hovered near, within the ring of 
distant flashlight, that of Una’s father, as 
transported now over the whole experi- 
ment as if he had never hinted that the 
far-flying rocket was a Quaker gun. 

With the girls in their little fairy-like 
ring of electric light — to go out like a 
will o’ the wisp presently — was their 
usual body-guard, old Andrew, who had 
driven the party up the mountain. 

‘‘Cannily noo, lassie! Cannily, Dinna 
be fechless — flighty!” The Scot was 
breathing like a Highland gust as he cau- 
tioned the girl whose tingling little thumb 
touched lightly as thistledown the fairy 
button. ‘‘Whoop!” he grunted sharply. 


A RECORD FLIGHT 


23 S 

I reckon they ’re maist ready, noo, to 
gie it its fling — let it go !” 

It was at this moment that in the distant 
island of flashlight an arm was flung up. It 
was that of the professor’s young assistant. 

He forgot to bring it down again. 

And, lo ! a hush, as of a world sus- 
pended, fell upon old Greylock, — that 
grim, black mountain-top. 

The long grasses ceased to whisper. 
The mountain-ash trees cuddled their little 
pale berry-babies in awe. 

All R-ready ! Shoot 

Toandoah’s battle-cry it was. 

A roar as of a small brass cannon, the 
first gun of the new conquest, responded, 
as the hand of a Camp Fire Girl of America 
pressed the button, triumphantly throwing 
the switch in the nozzle, or tailpart, of the 
mounted rocket, a hundred feet away. 

Simultaneously the flashlights went out. 

And in the darkness — into the black- 
ness the little Thunder Bird soared. 

Soared with the wild red eye of its 


PEMROSE LORRY 


236 

headlight challenging the heavens them- 
selves to stop it, with its comet-like tail 
of red fire streaming out full twenty feet 
behind it. 

At lightning speed, — fifty miles the first 
minute, a hundred the next, — it leaped from 
its mountain platform straight up — bound 
for the vacant lot of space. 

Explosion after bright explosion tore 
the cloud-banks as, one by one, the in- 
numerable little rockets, which Pern had 
watched her father fitting into their 
grooves in its interior — far back in that 
quiet laboratory — went off. 

And with each radiant roar higher — 
faster — it dashed, the little Thunder Bird, 
with never a puff of smoke to dim the 
spectacle — the transplendency of its 
flight. 

‘‘Michty! Michty! . . . Magerful!'’ 

There was just the one skirl from An- 
drew, to lend it music on its upward way ; 
he had not thought that he came to 
America to witness a thing like this. 


A RECORD FLIGHT 


237 


^‘Magerful”, indeed! Magical, indeed! 
The others were silent, swept away by 
the magic of it — the greater, moon- 
storming magic to come. 

Only — only, they breathlessly asked 
themselves : ^‘What next 

Well! the immediate "'next^’ would be 
the return of the golden egg, the diary, 
the falling fruit of the experiment, with- 
out which there was no proof of its suc- 
cess — of how high the fiery Bird had 
flown — before, its last automatic charge 
expended, it sang its swan-song some- 
where in space. 

At the increasing speed with which 
the little Thunder Bird flew — when miles 
were but a moment — the record might 
be expected back in a few minutes. 

Minutes — but they seemed a moon’s 
age! 

It was Una — Una — who saw it first : 
the tiny speck of star-dust drifting down, 
down among the woolly clouds — dark 
as if the night had been shorn and its 


PEMROSE LORRY 


238 

fleece hung out to dry — alighting here 
and there, the little firefly, in other words 
the atomy electric battery attached to 
the precious record, trying so hard, with the 
parachute’s aid, to find its way back to 
earth from the lonely height it had reached. 

Another quarter of a minute, and they 
could trace the outline of the black silk 
parachute, itself, a drifting crow with 
their prize in its claws ; that prize which 
the inventor, at least, would have given 
ten years of his life to grasp — if, grasp- 
ing it, he could see that the little pencil 
had duly made its record markings — 
the proof that his Thunder Bird had “got 
there.” 

“Glory halleluiah! it’s drifting down 
right into our laps — into the old moun- 
tain’s lap, rather 1 The wind won’t carry 
it far, I bet I ’T will land within quarter 
of a mile of us, anyhow,” shrieked the 
professor’s young assistant, a college boy, 
an athlete, who had led the quarter-mile 
sprint on many a hard-won field, when 


A RECORD FLIGHT 


239 


the racing honor of a school was at stake ; 
and he ran as never before to get the 
better of the tricky gusts and seize the 
parachute — faster, even, than the 
nickum, that mysterious youth, had run, 
when he saved the day for the mountain 
team at baseball. 

Hoot mon ! Dinna ye let it get away 
frae ye into the dar-rk woods!’’ skirled 
Andrew, equally excited, and filled with 
awe of the raven parachute now spring- 
ing, like a great, black mushroom, out of 
the night — and of the firefly which had 
been up so high. 

^‘Oh! it is — it is drifting towards the 
dark spruce woods — where we ’ll have 
hard work to find it.” 

In the wild chase after the prize. Pern- 
rose made a good third, as she thus shouted 
her fear. 

‘‘See — oh! see, it is landing,” she 
cried again, ‘^c-coming down — touching 
earth.” 

Yes ! for one fleeting instant it did 


240 


PEMROSE LORRY 


alight upon a mound, the shooting star- 
let, the little electric dry cell, winking 
brilliantly against the background of 
somber evergreens, now dark as Erebus, 
that girdle old Greylock’s crown. 

Then, freakish firefly, there, it was off 
again, the prey of the nickum gusts, be- 
fore ever a hand could touch it — the 
black parachute rotating like a whirli- 
gig- 

Never — oh, never — was such a chase 
for such a prize since mountain was moun- 
tain and man was man ! 

Once again the steely clog, the weight 
of the five-inch box containing the record- 
ing apparatus, the precious log, almost 
dragged it to a standstill ! But the sum- 
mit gusts were strong. 

Even the college boy began to have 
heart-quakes and Pemrose heart-sinkings. 

Jove ! What a stunt you ’re pulling 
off on us, you old black crow of a 
parachute — you booby-headed umbrella!” 
groaned he. ^‘C-can’t you stay put for 


A RECORD FLIGHT 


241 

just a second ? Or are you bent on leading 
us a dance through the woods 

He began to lose hope of its landing 
in his lap, that breezy athlete, as it made 
straight for the jaws of darkness now, the 
inky spruce-belt — the parachute coquetting 
with its pursuers, like a great black fan. 

Was — was it the wind then ? 

Something — something caught it up, the 
golden log — the first record from space 
— something snatched it up and whisked 
it off, off into those blackamoor woods, 
while the feet of the foremost runner were 
still many yards away. 

^‘Twas na the wind! Twas mon or 
deil ; I saw it loop out frae the boggart 
trees 1” roared Andrew. 

And now in his skirl there was a wild 
ring of superstition that turned girlish 
hearts quite cold. 

saw it loup out frae the dark — 
dar-rk woods!’’ he insisted hoarsely. 

Ah ! but those dim spruce woods were 
faintly illumined now with strange little 


PEMROSE LORRY 


242 

dots and dashes of light — the firefly 
winking passionately, as if somebody, some 
thief, were running with it. 

And they ran, too, its rightful owners, 
in full cry, calling frantically upon the 
robber, whether thief, or tempest, to stop. 

And the girls kept bravely up with 
the men. Or one of them did ! For all 
the spice of her chowchow name was 
afire in Pemrose Lorry now ; and she 
would have tackled the thief, single- 
handed, to g^'t back her father’s record. 

Into the core of darkness — in among the 
ebony spruce-boughs — the jetty, frowning 
trunks, the snarling, brambly underbrush, 
dashed the chase, the hue and cry, not 
daring to turn on a flashlight and in its 
glare lose the one little piloting blink 
ahead, which now seemed to have con- 
siderable odds on them, as it fled helter- 
skelter through the woods. 

^'My word! this — this beats anything 
I ever dr-reamed of,” gurgled the college 
boy. ‘‘The Thing, whatever it is, has 


A RECORD FLIGHT 


243 


us nicely fooled. There — there, it has 
switched off the ‘glim’ now — the little, 
telltale battery. Now — where are we?” 

No one could tell, as they floundered 
about, three men, and two girls, in the 
mysterious night-woods — without a clew 

— Pemrose clinging desolately to her 
father now, Una to hers — while Andrew, 
the Church Elder, muttered weird High- 
land curses. 

Nobody could tell where they were, 
indeed, figuratively, of course, except — 
except that the experiment was a failure, 
so far as any proof to the World was con- 
cerned ! 

Except that Toandoah’s hopes were 
dashed, — if not broken ! 

The first record from Space was stolen, 

— or lost. 


CHAPTER XX 
The Search 

No! She did not think the nickum 
had taken it, — that mysterious Jack at 
a Pinch 1 

This is what the bleeding heart of Pern- 
rose told her over and over again within 
the next twenty-four hours, — and after 
that, too I 

True, she had robbed him of his oars 
and a dance, — or had been responsible for 
the trick ! 

She had not made her scout-knights 
return those ashen blades until the morn- 
ing after the dance, when they were 
surreptitiously deposited upon the opposite 
shore of the lake in the neighborhood of 
the camp near the insects’ egg-boats. 

And she had enjoyed herself hugely 
as the guest of the White Birch Group 


THE SEARCH 


245 


at the wind-up of the June carnival, while 
he, twice a rescuer, a friend in a pinch, 
was drifting helplessly out upon the dark 
night-waters of the Bowl, trying to paddle 
with his hands, within hearing of the 
festive dance music, until some good Sa- 
maritan from his own shore rowed out and 
gave him a homeward tow. 

But all this, as the girl passionately 
told herself, was an everyday trick, — 
just a paper pellet thrown at one beside 
the overwhelming blow of the loss of her 
father’s record. 

And he who could quote Shakespeare 
upon '‘Something rotten in the state of 
Denmark”, amid the horrors of a zero 
train-wreck, who "liked his excitement 
warm ”, had a sense of humor. 

True humor is never without a sense 
of proportion. 

It knows where to stop. 

But if the nickum was not the thief, 
— who then ? 

Ta-te, the tempest — otherwise the 


246 PEMROSE LORRY 

mountain gusts — had to be acquitted 
too. 

For at the first dawn after the blighted 
experiment some thin silk rags of a raven 
parachute were found clinging, soot-like, 
to bushes in the spruce wood, together 
with a portion of a twisted and bent wire 
frame. 

There was not a trace of the diary, the 
golden egg, the little perforated steel box, 
with the recording pencil and paper in 
it. Deprived of its wing, that could not 
have gone on alone, — without some hand 
carrying it. 

So the weary and despondent searchers 
were forced to accept Andrew’s assertion 
that "‘mon or deil” had robbed them; 
and it was plain from the solemn shake 
of the '‘true-penny’s” gray head in its 
up-to-date chauffeur’s cap that he, him- 
self, was disposed to lay the blame on a 
‘‘deev.” 

‘'It’s plain to me, noo, that this auld 
Earth should bide where she belangs,” 


THE SEARCH 


247 


he told the two girls, ‘‘not go outside 
o’ her ain bit atmosphere — be sending 
muckle messages outside it — it ’s na 
canny.” 

He even respectfully delivered himself 
of this opinion to the inventor — to Toan- 
doah, with the hungry look of loss in his 
eye, which occasionally wrought Pemrose 
to the point of choking sobs and to clench- 
ing her fists at the mysterious robber. 

And he repeated it, with elaborations, 
did Andrew, on the second June morning 
after the loss when Professor Lorry, de- 
claring that it would take a year to search 
every foot of Greylock Peak, and that 
he was not going to waste time in crying 
over spilt milk, went down the mountain 
with his young assistant and Mr. Gros- 
venor, who had business in the valley, 
to procure materials for another experi- 
ment — although not on the same scale 
as the first — the girls being left behind 
with the landlady of the little mountain 
inn where they were staying; 


248 PEMROSE LORRY 

The chauffeur wore a ‘"dour” look as 
he saw them depart, Una’s father driv- 
ing his own car; for the first time in all 
his well-trained service, the true-penny 
was inclined to sulk over being told to 
keep an eye on two ‘‘daft lassies”, who 
refused to go down to the town, because 
they wanted to search some more — or 
Pemrose did. 

So he sat on a bench outside the little 
mountain house, thirty-six hundred feet 
above sea-level, where there were no 
visitors at this early season, with the ex- 
ception of the experimenting party, and, 
between whiffs of his pipe, discoursed 
upon the folly of simple earth folk in 
“ganging beyant themselves, thinking o’ 
clacking wi’ the Man in the Moon, for- 
bye” — and, in tones seemingly be- 
witched, of the black shape he had seen 
jump forth from the woods. 

“ Pshaw ! I do believe you think that 
it was some bad Tairy, Andrew, — fairy 
or mountain ‘deev’, who stole the little 


THE SEARCH 


249 

record, and part of the parachute, too — 
spirited them away,” said Una, with 
fanciful relish, having not quite grown 
beyond the fairy-tale age, herself. 

“ If that ’s so, girlie,” said the moun- 
tain landlady — alas ! for Andrew True- 
penny, alias Campbell, now came the 
evil chance over which he sulked — ‘'if 
that ’s so, and you could only find the 
mountain wishing-stone, stand on it and 
wish three times — wish har-rd — maybe, 
the good fairies would give you back what 
you Te looking for !” 

“Where — where is it — the wishing- 
stone?” The little fixed star in Una’s 
eye was never so bright — a twinkling 
star of poftent. “The wishing stone on 
Greylock ! Oh ! I never knew there was one. ” 
“Havers, woman! Dinna ye ken that 
ye hae a tongue to hold?” muttered the 
grizzled chauffeur, in a stern aside. 

But the motherly New Englander — 
who, with her old husband, could not for 
a moment be suspected of the theft — 


250 PEMROSE LORRY 

had her heart full for two sorrowing girls. 

^"Why! it’s a little over a mile from 
here, I guess, down the Man Killer trail, 
the third flat slab you come to. Fd 
go with you myself — though it ’s rough 
traveling, the steepest trail on the moun- 
tain — only my man is laid up with the 
rheumatiz, hangin’ on to him like a puppy- 
dog to a root.” 

‘‘Oh! we can find it for ourselves — 
hurrah I” shouted Una, almost squinting 
with anticipation. “ I Ve never stood upon 
a real mountain wishing-stone before. 
Who — who knows what may come of it ? ” 

In her young blood, as in Andrew’s, 
was the extravagant excitement of the 
whole experiment, — this first step in the 
ladder of demonstration which was by 
and by to reach the moon — lending to 
all an unearthly touch. 

‘‘The— the Man Killer trail! Why! 
that ’s one place where we haven’t 
searched — yet !” A moping Pemrose 
suddenly awoke. 


THE SEARCH 251 

To her, who had grown up amid the 
mathematical realities of an inventor’s 
laboratory, who had ''plugged” so hard 
at her elementary physics that she might 
be able to grasp the first principles of her 
father’s work, some day — some day to 
work with him, — to her, the little girl- 
mechanic, a wishing stone was no golden 
magnet. 

But the very fact that there was one 
spot, not so far from the summit, either — 
wildest spot on the mountain though it 
be — still unexplored, was enough to draw 
her restless feet anywhere, against any 
deadlock of difficulty. 

‘‘Ha! The Man Killer trail!” she 
whooped again. “Oh-h ! we could easily 
find it ; we saw a sign directing to it, as 
we came up the mountain.” 

“It’s na a trail; it’s just a hotch- 
potch o’ rocks — some sharp as stickit 
teeth ! ’’ groaned Andrew, who saw his 
own doom fixed, in vain protesting. 

He felt rather like a man who had been 


252 


PEMROSE LORRY 


left behind to hold a wolf by the ears 
when, in the teeth of every remonstrance 
he could offer, he found himself, a little 
later, starting out in the rear of two adven- 
turous girls, in quest of that third slab 
of a wishing stone — and the breath- 
racking Man Killer trail. 

But those girls were, to some degree, 
seasoned climbers, both, — sure-footed as 
venturesome ! 

Through the dim limelight of fringing 
pine woods, across oozing mud-beds, soft 
from spring rains and freshets, over a 
babbling brook spanned by an elastic 
bridge formed of the interlacing roots 
of giant trees — where Una found much 
delight in bouncing up and down in antici- 
pation of the magic stone — they stub- 
bornly held their way, and came at last 
to the chaos of rocks crowding a steep 
gorge which marked the head of the 
lonely Killer trail. 

“Noo — I gang first!’’ said Andrew 
— a true-penny still, though the stamp was 


THE SEARCH 


253 

reversed. ^‘My word!” he added sourly, 
‘'this is na trail — juist a scratch on the 
mountainside — an’ the muckle rocks 
they ’re a flail for beating the breath out 
of a puir body. ” 

“What — what do I care if they 
shouldn’t leave me a pinch if only I could 
find something — even a few more rags of 
the parachute I” gasped Pemrose, in stifled 
tones of passion, as she climbed, hurry- 
skurry, over a piled capsheaf of bowlders. 

Indeed, that battling breath was at a 
low ebb in all three when, following the 
tangled skein of a sort of trail which the 
feet of daring climbers had beaten, here 
and there, amid the rocks, they reached 
in due time the third slab which, like 
the invisible running water in Tory Cave, 
was supposed to bring “piping times” 
of luck to whoever should brave the diffi- 
culties of the wild pass, to stand on it 
and wish. 

“Oh — oh I there it is, at last,” cried 
Una, her hand to her breathless side, “ a 


2S4 


PEMROSE LORRY 


nice 'squatty’ slab — almost as smooth 
as glass — an’ shaped like a mud-turtle. 
I wonder if there is a fairy underneath 
it — lurking under the rim. Now — now 
for the wishing cap ! ” 

But before she could don Fortunatus’ 
cap by breaking a wee branch from a 
dwarf cedar growing amid the crags and 
wreathing it, like a green cottage bonnet, 
around her head, she slipped upon the 
wet moss girdling the stone where a tiny 
spring bubbled, and almost pitched head- 
long down the trail, at this point par- 
ticularly steep. 

Easy there, lassie ! Ye dinna want to 
mak’ o’ that auld flat slab a tombstone, 
eh.?” murmured Andrew, laying a great 
hand upon her shoulder, with a little 
smack of laughter upon his long, smooth- 
shaven upper lip. 

But immediately he winced as if his 
own words hurt him, and Pemrose — 
herself in an aching mood — knew what he 
was thinking of, that grizzled chauffeur. 


THE SEARCH 


2SS 

Una, her balance recovered, jumped 
upon the stone. 

Surely, no wishing-cap ever before was 
so bonnie, so becoming as the fine, 
emerald needles of the little cedar branch 
gripped together under the dimpled chin, 
fringing the sweet, saucy, girlish face, the 
star in the bright dark eye so intently 
fixed. 

Pern smiled ; in the present crisis of 
her young life she didn’t care if her friend’s 
eyelashes were longer than hers by a whole 
ell. And Andrew sighed because of that 
one ''sair memory” which had oppressed 
him on the Pinnacle. 

The serio-comic passion in the green- 
framed face, the fervor in the one little 
clenched fist drooping at Una’s side, might 
well have won over all the good fairy-hosts 
that ever landed in the wake of the Pil- 
grims, and set them to scouring Grey- 
lock for the missing record from on high. 

“Now then! Pemrose, it’s up to you! 
Turn your backbone into a wishbone.” 


PEMROSE LORRY 


256 

The wreathed figure stepped from the 
pedestal, — a laughing June spot against 
the wintry grimness of the Man Killer 
trail. 

Obligingly the inventor’s daughter 
stepped up, closing her eyes half-hu- 
morously, doubling the drooping hands 
at her panting sides. 

But, as suddenly, the eyelids were flung 
up, like shutters from the blue of day. 
The uncurling fists were outflung pas- 
sionately. 

* ‘‘I can’t! I canH!^^ cried Pemrose 
Lorry, choking upon her own wishbone. 

I — I’m not in the humor for it — for 
foolery 1 I must go on — right on — and 
search 1 This — this is the shortest trail 
down the mountain, if it ’s the roughest 
— I know that!” She looked des- 
perately at old Andrew. ‘‘If any mean 
thief — anybody — stole that record, 
there could be only one — one motive 
for it, my father-r says — curiosity; to be 
the fir-rst to see that very first record man 


THE SEARCH 


257 


has ever got from so high up — high up 
in the earth’s thin atmosphere, where 
the air ends — and space begins !” 

She seemed to have that whole zero 
void in her heart now, its light, stifling 
gases in her distended throat — Toan- 
doah’s little pal — as she looked dis- 
tractedly down the gorge. 

‘^Oh! it’s pos-si-ble — just barely 
possible, that after he had satisfied his 
cur-ios-ity — or mischief — or whatever 
it was — he might have thrown away 
the little steel box, dropped it some- 
where on the trail,” she panted extrava- 
gantly. ‘‘Or — or we might even come 
on some more rags of the parachute and 
track him — track him to a camp ! My 
father-r — ” 

It was the passionate break on that 
word, even more than the spice in the 
blue eyes, that went straight to the shad- 
owed spot in Andrew’s heart and found the 
little sprig of memorial heather, hidden there, 
the mountain heather, the tiny, pinkish 


PEMROSE LORRY 


258 

blossoms, with the faint, wild tang, which 
he plucked whenever he went home to 
Scotland from a small grave in a hill- 
side "'kirkyard"' on whose granite marker 
was printed: “Margery Campbell, aged 
fifteen !” 

It had been as much the restlessness of 
bereavement as a desire to better their 
fortunes which had brought his wife and 
him to the New World, for she had been 
their only child, with the exception of 
one son, old enough to be in the American 
Army. 

The fragrance of that imaginary heather- 
bloom tucked away in the impassive 
chauffeur’s breast was occasionally 
apparent in a furtive glance thrown sky- 
ward, or in a momentary glisten of mist 
in the gray shell of the mechanical eye. 

It had made the whole family of his 
employers very sympathetic towards 
Andrew, as to a friend. And now a whiff 
of that heather memory stood Pemrose 
in good stead. 


THE SEARCH 259 

I reckon if leetle Margery were livin’, 
she ’d feel in the verra same way gin 
anny misfortune happed to me,’’ he told 
himself. 

Aw, weel, lassie !” Thus he spoke 
aloud. Since ye ’re set on gaeing on a 
wee bit further, we ’ll gang ; but dinna 
get yer hopes stickit on finding onything !” 

''Andrew — Andrew, himself, has found 
something! Look — look at him!” 

It was barely twenty minutes later that 
the wildly startled cry burst from Una 
as the trio struggled on — on down the 
fitful path, between the rocky jaws of 
the Man Killer, where beetling crags 
loomed, fang-like, on either side of them 
and, here and there some swollen rill 
made of a green moss-bank a slimy mud- 
bed. 

"He — he’s hearing things, if he isn’t 
seeing them. Oh, look! . . . Look at 
him!” 

Una’s hand was at her jumping heart 
— pressing hard as if to hold it in her 


26 o PEMROSE lorry 

body — as she beheld the tall figure of 
the chauffeur, motionless as arrested 
mechanism, upon the trail, ahead. 

‘‘I heerd a — skirl.” Andrew’s face was 
stony as that of the Old Man of Grey- 
lock — a featured rock — as he turned 
it upon the breathless girls. 

“A skirl ! A cry !” he repeated hoarsely. 
“ ’T was na the yap of an animal, either ! 
Somebody — somebody ’s yawping for help 
out here in this awfu’ spot ! Dinna ye hear 
it, children ?” 

They did. .Their flesh began to creep. 

Up, upward, struggling between great 
rocks, it climbed, that cry, where the 
stony teeth of the Man Killer bit the trail 
right in two. 

‘‘Help — h-help!” it pleaded. “Oh — 
help!” Then feebly, but fierily: ^'Oh-h! 
confound it — help, I say 1” 

That was the moment when Pemrose 
Lorry shook as if the old Man Killer were 
devouring her. 

Was there — could there be something 


THE SEARCH 261 

familiar, half-familiar, about the faint, 
volcanic shout : some accent she seemed to 
have heard before ? And yet — and yet, 
not quite that, either ! 

‘‘ My word ! Some puir body’s hur-rted 
bad — ba-ad — like a toad under a harrow,” 
grunted Andrew, and scrambled hastily on 
over a gray barrier of rocks, — the girls 
following. 

Once again it limped painfully up to 
them, the cry, like a visible, broken thing. 
‘‘Help — h-help, I say!” Then, feebly, 
in rock-bitten echo : ''Help /” 


CHAPTER XXI 
The Man Killer 

'‘We must lift him out of the mud! 
Oh-h I even if it hurts him — terribly 
— we ’ll have to lift him to a dry spot.” 

It was Pemrose Lorry who spoke. To- 
gether with her Camp Fire sisters she 
had taken some training in first aid. And 
one agonizing accident which she had been 
told how to deal with was the case of a 
knee-cap displaced or broken. 

There almost seemed to be a broken 
head on her own young shoulders through 
which wild, streaky lights and shadows 
came stealing, like moonlight through 
cracked shutters whose chinks are not 
wide enough to reveal clearly any object 
in a room. 

It was the same breathlessly unreal 
feeling — the same dim moonlit groping. 


THE MAN KILLER 263 

that she had felt as she sat on the cliff- 
brow with Stud, when he talked of the 
nickum and his father — and called the 
latter a queer fish !” 

For one thing she knew at a glance ! 
She had seen the injured man, who lay 
calling for help in a miry spot of the Man 
Killer trail, before. Three times before, 
said lightning perception ! 

And it came upon her now, as emergency’s 
"stiff breeze blew the cobwebs from her brain, 
the occasion of the second time, sandwiched 
in between that zero day when he had 
dragged her up a snow-bank, the youth 
who saved her addressing him as Dad, and 
the smiling June one when he lay on a fern- 
bed before his lake-shore camp, grumpily 
fishing. 

I — I saw him : I know I saw him 
— again — crossing the street outside 
Una’s home on the day when the last 
installment of the Will was read,” she 
realized, her hands coming together con- 
vulsively at the thought of the blighting 


PEMROSE LORRY 


264 

codicil which hung up the fortunes of the 
moon-going Thunder Bird for twelve long 
years. 

‘‘ He — he was wearing the same gray 
cap was the next cleaving flash of 
memory. 

He was not really wearing it now. It 
bobbed in the rill beside him. 

As one eye turned feverishly towards 
it, the third thunder clap of perception 
came in the staggering sense of how like 
he was to Una. 

She might have been his daughter — 
Una — with that little fixed star of feel- 
ing set like a shining pebble now in her 
right, fascinated eye, reflected, exaggerated 
in the glazed cast of pain in the stone- 
gray eye of the man beneath her, whose 
climber’s suit of homespun was daubed 
with mountain mud, — whose tweed cap 
was the brooklet’s toy. 

He had been trying to scoop up water 
in it. 

And that brought Pemrose Lorry, Camp 


THE MAN KILLER 265 

Fire Girl, to herself again, within quarter 
of a minute of her first laying eyes on him. 

For there is one gallant anchor that 
will hold in any pinch, — when thought 
is shattered and speculation the maddest 
blurr : the Camp Fire law : Give Service ! 

She unhooked her little camper’s cup 
from where it hung at her green belt, and 
offered him a drink. 

She dipped her handkerchief in the 
trickle of water and wiped the cold drops 
of faintness and agony from his fore- 
head. 

And then, when he had confided to 
Andrew, who knelt beside him, that he 
had slipped upon the wet, slimy moss 
beside the rill, as he ascended the trail, 
and broken his knee-cap by striking 
heavily against a confronting rock, she 
said that they must lift him to a dry spot. 

^‘That’s — r-right. She knows what 
to — do. Ouch ! a — a knee-cap slipped, 
or broken — is — the deuce of a rack, ” 
groaned the victim, as they proceeded to 


266 


PEMROSE LORRY 


raise him, the girls supporting, each, a 
knickerbockered leg, Pemrose the injured 
one, while Andrew took the main weight 
of the writhing body, until they laid it 
upon some dry moss. 

Yes! and she knew further what to 
do, that Camp Fire Girl who wore the 
Fire Maker’s bracelet upon her wrist, 
for plucking off her soft, green sweater 
she rolled it into a wad and placed it 
under the hollow of the injured knee, so 
flexing it, supporting it, while Una 
doubled hers into a pillow for his head, — 
Una who moved as if in a fantastic dream. 

And then arose the question as to the 
next move ; how to go about obtaining 
further help. 

“We might — might make a stretcher 
with poles, saplings, with our sweaters, 
your coat, Andrew, and — and carry him 
down to the nearest farmhouse,” Pern 
suggested. 

No-o thank — you!” The injured 
man shifted his shoulders ever so slightly 


THE MAN KILLER 267 

upon one elbow and looked at her; the 
tiniest laugh shot the rapids of pain in 
his eye. "‘My son said you had a whole 
lot of pep same that ’s in your in- 
ventor-father, I suppose, who wants to 
bombard the .moon ! . . . My son who 
play-ing baseball now down on the Grey- 
lock field — mountain’s foot !” The 
sufferer here appealed to Andrew. "‘If 
you could only — get him up here, I ’d 
be all right ! There’s an auto at the nearest 
farmhouse maybe they ’d let you take 
it. Any one any one can point out 
Starry’” — in a lame rush of pride — 
player who made that home run—” 
Hadna I better bid him bring a doctor 
along too — a stretcher as weel.?” put 
in the Scotchman dryly. 

The victim nodded, looking at the 
other’s cap. 

‘'You’re a chauffeur,” he pleaded; 
“you ’ll drive fast ?” 

Aye, fegs ! Fast as God and gaso- 
line will let me!” answered Andrew 


268 PEMROSE LORRY 
devoutly, with an anxious glance at the 
two girls. 

As his tall, spare figure scrambled on 
down the trail, the sufferer raised his 
eyes to Pemrose. 

‘‘If — if you could t-twist my knap- 
sack round from under me,” he mur- 
mured ; “there’s a restorative in it — 
a few drops of ammonia — I’m faint!” 

I She did so — and turned for the moment 
as faint as he was. 

The whole trail swam, grew black — 
black as the wisp of thin, ebony silk, 
parachute silk, with a fraction of a bent 
wire frame peeping out from one corner 
of that roomy knapsack. 

“ Well ! are you going to desert me 
now-ow ? ... Now that the thief is so-o 
nice-ly bagged 1” i 

The man looked up at her, some dash 
of whimsical fire in him mastering weak- 
ness ; at the girl kneeling, bolt upright, 
with the black rag between her hands, 
and the twisted scrap of frame, — the 



The man looked up at her, some dash of whimsical 
fire mastering weakness. Page 268. 



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THE MAN KILLER 269 

frame which had drifted down two hundred 
miles. 

“Ar-re you — going — to desert me 
now ? ” 

Again the anchor held ; the noble 
anchor : Give Service : it was as if a voice 
outside of her numbed self spoke the 
words. 

The raven rags dropped from between 
her fingers, — their reflection from her face. 

Steadily enough, she found the little 
vial lying amid the top layer in that 
pigskin knapsack, shook a few drops from 
it, into the thimble-like glass accompany- 
ing, mixed them with water, held them 
to his lips. 

At the same time she dipped her hand- 
kerchief again and passed it over his fore- 
head. 

‘‘Ha! Pity as well as ^pep^ in you, 
eh ? Good The sufferer actually 
winked one eye as the stimulant trickled 
down. “Well 1 my dear, the little re- 
cording apparatus is in that knapsack 


270 


PEMROSE LORRY 


too ; I — I make you a present of it — 
and of the codicil to my brother’s will, 
as well. . . . You won’t have to wait 
twelve years.” 

Then, indeed, the trail seemed to double 
up, to wind itself around Pern’s brain, 
rocks and all, — only every rock was gold- 
edged, a nugget. 

Her eyes stared straight before her, — 
blue as the June violet that caught a drop 
from the spring near. 

‘‘Who — who are you.?” screamed Una, 
forgetting that she was speaking to a 
broken man. 

“ How about my being your uncle, Tref- 
frey Graham, my dear, who — who was 
such a mad fellow — in — youth ; s-such an 
oddity.? Oh-h! you’ve heard of him — 
have — you .?” 

The whimsical light in the pain- 
reddened eyes burned to mockery now. 
It showed the hippogrilf, the “hot tamale”, 
still there. Evidently eccentricity wasn’t 
all dead. 


THE MAN KILLER 


271 


‘‘Humph! By Jove I I’m having 
some fun out of my broken knee, after 
all — electrifying you girls, ” gurgled the 
still racked voice. “Dramatic setting for 
a denouement, too, the old Man Killer 
trail!” 

“But why — oh 1 why-y did you do it 
Pern snatched up the rag of parachute 
again, her eyes going wildly from the 
soot-like scrap of silk to a wonderful, 
antique ring upon the little finger of the 
pale hand which twitched so strangely 
below her. 

“What! S-steal the little record, you 
mean!” The bushy eyebrows were 
twitching, too. “Well ! maybe I want-cd 
to make sure, for myself, that the rocket 
really had gone higher than anything 
earthly ever flew yet, before — before I 
resigned a fortune to it. ” 

That was the moment when the nuggets 
all turned to rocks again for Pemrose. 
He saw the change in her face. 

“Oh! I don’t mean anything der-og- 


272 


PEMROSE LORRY 


a-tory to your father, my dear’’ — pain 
snatched at the man’s breath — "‘or to his 
invention, either. I knew him before you 
did. ‘Why did I do it?’ Curiosity — 
eccentricity, I suppose — anything you 
like to call it ! I always was such a 
‘terror’ — a regular zany, my college 
friends used to call me. ” 

A flash from those prankful days, erratic 
as a shooting star, shot the glaze in the 
sufferer’s eye. 

“And, then — and then, I really am 
interested in everything connected with 
the conquest of the air — of space — my- 
self,” the hampered speaker went on. 
“I’ve done a little flying, out West, — ■ 
my son, too ! I found out when the 
experiments with your father’s inven- 
tion — 

“We call it the Thunder Bird,” put 
in Una, as pain again called for a break. 

“ Ha ! Good name for it ! Piles up 
the moon-going romance, eh? Well-11,” 
wearily, “having found out the par-ti- 


THE MAN KILLER 


273 


cu-lar night on which the lit-tle model 
rocket was to fly, I came up the moun- 
tain to a small camp that my son and I 
have ne-ar the summit — east side of 
Greylock. I was standing on the edge 
of the spruce woods, watching the whole 
performance. Then — then, when the 
parachute dragging the little recording 
apparatus blew towards me in the dark- 
ness, almost into my hand, I — why ! 
I snatched it up and ran with it. Why.? 
Oh, because I suppose the boy has never 
died in me: the boy that’s "part pirate, 
part pig !’ ” with a grating chuckle. 

Incredible as it seemed, the low laughter, 
the treacherous tinkle, was echoed by 
girlish lips as that renascent urchin mo- 
mentarily swaggered in the glaze of the 
suffering eye ! 

“And then — and then something told 
me — an aberration, I suppose, as my 
impulses usually are — that I had some 
sort of r-right to see the very first record 
man had ever got of that upper air, of 


274 


PEMROSE LORRY 


Space, if — if I was go-ing to turn over 
a couple of hundred thousand dollars, for 
the pursuit of the — sov-er-eign invention. ’’ 

“I — I can’t believe it,” murmured Pern 
into the stony teeth of the Man Killer. 

‘‘I meant to return the record next 
morning, but I was a-fraid your father 
might shoot me,” to Pemrose. ‘‘Then, 
later, I heard he had gone down the moun- 
tain — that was yesterday and a mistake 

— I went down, too, to beard him. A 

— a little more water, please ! I could 
not climb again until to-day ; I took the 
Man Killer trail, as being the shortest. 
And — here I am !” grimly. 

“Incidentally, I gave our family lawyer 
a shock, little niece,” he went on, as Una, 
plucking up courage, adjusted her sweater 
under his head ; she began to like this uncle 
with the pebble-like cast in his stone-gray 
eye, she began to think that girls — Camp 
Fire Girls, especially, with their love of the 
fanciful — might have more patience with 
him than others had had. 


THE MAN KILLER 


275 


*^Yes! you bet I gave old Cartwright 
the staggers ! ’’ He laughed down the 
twinge of agony in his voice. '‘Called 
him up on the long distance telephone, 
told him I was Treffrey Graham back; 
that I had been in the East nearly six 
months, with my son ; that I came pretty 
near disclosing myself on the — on the day 
when the third installment of my brother’s 
will was read — actually walked up to 
the door of my sister’s house, then shied 
off, because . . . Oh, gosh ! this knee. ” 

The voice broke ; it had really become 
a feverish babble of excitement now — 
pain’s wild excitement. 

"Well! What was I saying — yes! I 
didn’t ring the bell because I hadn’t made 
up my mind whether I wanted to claim 
any share of my brother’s fortune, or not ; 
you see he hadn’t been very fair to me 
in youth — taking away my sweetheart. 
None of my family had — for — that — 
matter ! I didn’t know whether I wanted 
to meet them again. Although I liked the 


PEMROSE LORRY 


276 

look of my little niece ; I had seen her, at 
a distance, with her mother. And then, we 
didn’t need the money, my boy and I ! 
Had enough of our own; Treffrey Graham 
may be a terror, but he isn’t a failure — 
financially !” 

No — not by a long shot! said the 
flame of the pigeon-blood ruby upon the 
pale little finger, now curling significantly 
in air, — the gem whose fire in this wild 
spot seemed as erratic as his own, seeing 
that none but a zany would have worn 
it here. 

‘‘So — so I told old Cartwright this 
morning that I stepped out of that strung- 
out will,” a smile curled the pallid lips 
now; “that I authorized him to make 
preparations, at once, for the turning 
over of the remainder of my brother’s 
wealth, in his name and mine, to the 
University of our native city, to be used 
for the furtherance of Professor Lorry’s 
won-der-ful invention for r-reaching in- 
de-finite heights.” 


THE MAN KILLER 277 

‘‘My father! ... Oh! my fa-ther!” 
It was a wild little cry to which the Man 
Killer rang now, as the head of Pemrose 
Lorry went down upon her knees. 

“Yes, I’m glad his way is clear — 
though, I suppose, only a man ‘whose head 
grew under his arm’ would have managed 
the thing as I have done.” The sufferer 
winked through the veil of pain. “ Now ! 
my son is different. He ’s a dare-devil 
too — but he knows where to stop. You 
couldn’t have bribed him to steal that record 
— though somebody played a trick on him 
the other night — robbed him of his oars 
and a dance — just when he had ‘taken the 
bit between his teeth’, too; said he was 
tired of this camouflage business, and he was 
going — going whether I liked it, or not 1 ” 
That was the moment when 
Pern’s shoulders trembled like the needles 
upon the little green cedar sapling that 
grew by the rill : all because the Wise 
Woman in her was shaking the Elf, bid- 
ding her go to sleep for ever — which 


PEMROSE LORRY 


278 

the Elf, very properly, refused to do, 
for, after all,'^ undiluted wisdom would 
be a colorless cloak for any young back. 

‘"Well! he — he wouldn’t speak to us 
when we just wanted to thank him for 
saving us in that terrible train-accident,” 
put in Una defensively. 

“Ha! That was my fault, little niece. 
I made him promise, on coming East, 
that he wouldn’t go near any of his rela- 
tives, risk being identified by them, until 
I had decided what to do about the legacy 
— and whether I was going to make my- 
self known to them, or not. Now-ow, I 
hope you ’ll be friends. He ’s your own 
cousin — Treff junior.” 

And so Jack at a Pinch at last came 
into his own in the shape of a name ! 

“Yes, called after me, he is ! Good- 
ness ! don’t I wish he ’d hurry up and 
get here, now — with the doctor.?” 

It was a hollow groan. Pain was, at 
length getting the better of that capricious 
spirit. 


THE MAN KILLER 


279 


“ Can T — can ’t I do — anything — to 
make you more comfortable Pemrose 
asked. 

Then suddenly remembering that it was 
he who was making the Thunder Bird’s 
fortune, as impulsively as the little cedar 
tree leaned to the swollen rill, she bent 
and kissed the cold sweat of pain from 
his forehead. 

‘‘That — that’s worth coming East for,” 
murmured the man, his own eyes growing 
wet. “Little niece! don’t you want to — 
follow — suit ? I suppose, a year from now, 
your Thunder Bird will fly. ” 


CHAPTER XXII 
A June Woman 

FEEL as if I was in the pictures!’’ 

! I feel as if I was In the pictures.” 

It was the wild thought in each girl’s 
breast, as minutes went on. 

The loneliness of the mountain pass, 
nearly three thousand feet above sea- 
level, the rigors of the wind sweeping up 
it, chill now, June not yet being ten days 
old, the frowning crags, the remote heads 
of other tall mountains peeping over their 
shoulders, the two green dots of girls on 
either side of a broken man, they took 
it all ih, to the full, most dramatically 
too — and felt as if they were in the pic- 
tures. 

A surpassing moving picture reel, more 
telling than any they had ever witnessed, 
in which — oh, queer double-headed feel- 


A JUNE WOMAN 281 

ing — they were both actors and spec- 
tators ! 

But pain — pain left no atmosphere of 
unreality about it for the suffering man, 
for the sufferer who monopolized both 
their soft sweaters, while they shivered 
convulsively, until if it came to a beauty 
contest between the two now, the old Man 
Killer, awarding the palm, would not have 
made it dependent on a mere matter of 
eyelashes, but on which little nose was the 
least blue bitten. 

Pain released something in that sufferer 
too, — a fire that was not all wild-fire ! 
For suddenly he dragged Una’s green 
sweater-roll from under his head and 
thrust it towards her with an imperious : 
"'Put it on, child !” 

"I shan’t!” replied that child of lux- 
ury, as arbitrarily, slipping it back under 
the pallid cheek, above which the stand 
of agony in the stony eye told that the 
man was suffering almost to a point of 
delirium now. 


282 


PEMROSE LORRY 


^‘Who ever thought Una would be such 
a brick?’’ Pern nibbled the words between 
her chattering teeth. ‘‘She’s shivering 

— yes ! and frightened and trying to cry 

— but the brick in her won’t allow it!” 

There was no doubt that the uncle of 

her blood was a brick, too, for he fought 
the groans reverberating behind his 
clenched teeth, like a bee in a bottle, 
only breaking out now and again in a 
yearning prayer for the coming of his 
son. 

“ If he^^ were only here — here 1” he 
moaned ; it was evident that the youth- 
ful daredevil who liked excitement, but 
“knew where to stop”, was a tower of 
strength to the less balanced father. 

Pern was longing uncontrollably for his 
appearance, also — for the rower whom she 
had robbed of his oars, while the sufferer 
seemed to find his only relief in talking 
about him. 

“ My son and I have been in bad scrapes 
before among — mountains,” he panted. 


A JUNE WOMAN 283 

feverishly. Once high up in the 
Canadian Rockies, we missed our guide 
who had gone back for provisions. Bad 
plight then, but the boy didn’t ^cave’ ! 
He was only fifteen when he shot his 
bear in Arizona. He loves the West. 
But the East’s in his blood. Just went 
wild over these Berkshire Hills, this spring, 
over his first sight of mayflowers ! They 
seemed more of a treasure than the for- 
tune he wanted to part with. Hiff-f!'* 
Before the eyes of both girls rose the 
clamor of color ^"blooming round” in old 
Tory Cave — the armful of passe blos- 
soms flung down at the ‘‘rattler” scare. 

“Yes — his Mother Earth has been 
good to him,” muttered the whimsical 
voice. “Very good! Yet — yet such are 
earth-sons that he ’d turn his back on 
her to-morrow — go off on a wild-goose 
chase after some other world — even a 
dead one — if only that moon-storming 
Thunder — Bird — ” 

“What! You don’t mean to say — 


PEMROSE LORRY 


284 

oh ! did he write to my father about it 

— write to my father and sign himself 
‘T. S/ V broke in Pemrose, glancing back 
along the trail which she had traveled 
these past few months and finding it 
stranger, more baffling than the Man 
Killer’s. 

“ May — may — have done so,” came 
the answer, with a faint chuckle. ‘‘I asked 
him when pressed for a name to give his 
mother’s — his middle one — Selkirk. But 
he a lunar can-di-date ! Not if I know it ! 
With me, the moon may have the money 

— but not the boy !” 

‘‘The moon may have the money!” 
Pemrose Lorry glanced at the mud-stained 
knapsack lying by the sufferer, — the 
knapsack tucked away in which was the 
golden egg, the precious record ; she 
would not unearth it and glance at it, 
because the second look, at least, belonged 
to her father. 

This mature madcap upon the ground, 
this queer, practical joker, chastened now. 


A JUNE WOMAN 285 

if never before, had played on him a cruel 
prank, but, at least, he was not the fool 
who loved money for its own sake. 

^‘If — only — I could do anything for 
him!’’ yearned the girl passionately. 
“Oh ! I ’d want father — father — to 
feel that I did ev-ery-thing for him.” 

And, as once before in a watery pinch, 
the thought of Toandoah’s honor, Toan- 
doah’s debt to this trapped March hare, 
was the vital breath of inspiration. 

“Have — have you any matches ?” 
Suddenly she bent to the ashen ear. 

“In my br-reast pocket, yes.” It was 
a feebly appreciative flicker. 

“A fire! I — I a Camp Fire Girl 

— and not to think of it sooner ! Una ! 
Una ! Get busy ! Gather wood, quickly 

— quickly — all-11 the dry wood you can !” 
And the friendly little cedar gave of 

its one brown arm, the spruce chit, the 
birch stripling, the pine urchin — all the 
hop-o’-my-thumb timber that flourished 
in this wild pass — contributed of the 


286 


PEMROSE LORRY 


dead limbs tom from them by last winter’s 
blasts, to burn up the chill in the old 
Man Killer’s heart. 

Una’s little nose, piquantly tiptilted, 
warmed from a fashionable orchid-color 
to a cheery rose pink, with the excite- 
ment, the pressing adventure of trailing 
firewood among the rocks and dragging 
it captive to the new-born blaze which 
Pern was fanning with her breath and with 
the breezy bellows of her short green skirt. 

As for the sufferer, hope stirred anew 
in him as he turned his head towards the 
flaming pennons of good cheer, while the 
fire, prospering gayly, feathered its nest 
with scarlet down. 

He saw, too, that the fire-witch was pre- 
paring something in that red nest for him. 

Raking out ' the first glowing embers, 
she filled her little aluminum cup at the 
rill and set it among them; when it 
steamed she shook into it a few drops 
from the little vial — the aromatic spirits 
of ammonia — and held it to his lips. 


28/ 


A JUNE WOMAN 

“ It *s the best I can do,” she mur- 
mured, but her eyes stretched that best 
into an indefinite blue of longing to cap- 
ture the pain even for a short time and 
bear it for him — for him who was making 
the Thunder Bird’s fortune. 

As before, the stimulant set the racked 
heart to sending strength through the freez- 
ing veins — and with it a touch of the whim- 
sicality which Death alone could quench. 

“Little girl !” Treffrey Graham’s eye 
winked upon a mote of fun that softened 
to a mist. “Your fa-ther’s invention is 
the gr-reatest thing yet ; it ’s a Success 

— I know that from the one glimpse I 
had at the record—” Pemrose winced 

— “ but — but you may tell him from me 
that I doubt if, after all, his Thunder 
Bird is the best thing he ’s turned out.” 

“ Some-somebody coming ! Oh-h, some- 
body — coming!” cried Una, at that 
moment, so that the man started up, 
with a heyday exclamation — and tumbled 
back, a wreck of groans. 


288 PEMROSE LORRY 

For it was not his son. Neither was 
it the long-coated figure of the chauffeur, 
at sight of which each girl would have 
passionately hugged herself — if not him. 

But it was a messenger whom Andrew 
had sent. 

And at sight of her, of the fresh moun- 
tain rose in_her cheeks, with its heart of 
American gold, the climbing flash in her 
hazel eye, Una just tumbled into sobs, 
herself, that little fixed star in her eye 
blazing pathetic welcome, for this was 
her first taste of emergency’s pinch, emer- 
gency’s call for sacrifice. 

“Are you — oh! are you come to stay 
with us — us?” she cried, running for- 
ward with childish confidence. 

“That I be — girlie!” responded the 
mountain woman, throwing a warm arm 
around her. “The man that borrowed 
our little aut’mobile truck and set off in 
it at a score down the mountain, the man 
with a queer blowpipe at the roots of his 
tongue, he told me that he had left two 


A JUNE WOMAN 289 

lassies up here on the lonely trail, with 
a badly hurt man. ‘Woman!’ says he, 
kind o’ fierce-like, ‘if they were yer own 
bit lassies, ye ’d scorch the rocks, climb- 
ing to ’em.’ ‘Man I’ says I,” the Greylock 
woman paused, half-laughingly, to catch 
her breath, “‘I never laid eyes on them, 
or on the broken-kneed man, either, but 
I ’ll warm the way, just the same.’ But, 
mercy I it took me most an hour to get 
here — though only a mile of climbing 
— the old Man Killer is — so-o — fierce.” 

Her eye, at that, went to the fire, now 
brilliantly painting the trail, to the 
pillowed figure upon the moss, with the 
sweater-roll in the hollow of the injured 
knee. 

“But, land sakes I I needn’t ha’ been 
in such a rniad hurry getting here, after 
all — giving my skin to make ear-laps 
for the old Man Killer !” she cried, holding 
up two raw palms, flayed by indiscrimi- 
nate climbing. “For, my senses ! they ’re 
no stray lambs o’ tenderfoot — those ‘twa bit 


290 


PEMROSE LORRY 


lassies’!” mimicking Andrew’s blowpipe. 
“They know how to take care of them- 
selves in a pinch — and of somebody else, 
too ! . . . And — and, see here, what 
I ’ve brought you, honey, rolled in the 
blanket for Aim/” 

“Cake — choc’late cake! C-coffee!” 
Una gasped feebly, confronted by the 
ghost of her everyday life. 

She grasped the reality, though, of that 
normal life, somewhere waiting for her, 
with the first bite into the brown-eyed cake, 
while her sweater was restored to her thinly 
clad shoulders as the mountain woman 
spread her blanket over the injured man 
and tucked it under him for a pillow. 

“You — you ’re a ‘trump,’ little niece — 
letting me have it for-r so long,” he said 
wistfully. 

f And Una shyly forbore to answer. 

Occasionally it is easier to land grace- 
fully after a long jump than a short one in 
the case of an awkward gulf to be crossed ! 
She saw that her friend Pemrose, no relation 


291 


A JUNE WOMAN 

at all to this extraordinary uncle, could 
care for him and welcome him without 
embarrassment, while, with every doubt- 
ful glance in his direction, she felt, still, 
as if she did not quite know whether she 
was on her head or her heels. 

She crept, for reassurance, very close 
to the mountain woman, the typical June 
woman, with the normal rose in her cheeks^ 
and the golden buttercup for a heart, as 
she picnicked, subdued, by the trail fire. 

‘‘I don’t think — oh! I don’t believe 
I ever met anybody q-quite like you be- 
fore. But I ’m so glad you ’re in the 
world !” she murmured gratefully. 

‘‘And I just wish you could come into 
my world often, girlie,” was the cuddling 
answer, “for it ’s lonely as old Sarum 
here on the mountainside — though where 
old Sarum is I don’t know myself!” 
breezily. 

“Nor I !” laughed Una. 

“Old Man Greylock doesn’t talk to 
one, you know — only roars sometimes.” 


PEMROSE LORRY 


292 

The woman lifted her eye to the dim 
peak above her, with the pale mists 
streaming, tress-like, about its crown, 
from which Mount Greylock takes its 
name ; then her anxioits glance returned 
to the sufferer. ‘"Ha! there he goes — 
making faces at the pain again/’ she 
murmured pityingly. ^‘And, mercy! I 
suppose ’twill be a blue moon yet — a dog’s 
age — before his son can get here.” 

It was a long age anyhow; 'although, 
in reality, little more than an hour — a 
wild, wind-ridden, fire-painted hour — be- 
fore three haggard men came stumbling 
up the trail. 

Two carried a stretcher between them. 
One had a bag in his hand. 

As they hoisted that collapsible 
stretcher between its poles over the last 
bleak hurdle of rock, one, the youngest, 
dropped his end of it, which the doctor, 
shifting his bag, took up. 

Jack at a Pinch rushed forward. 

And ever afterwards Pern liked that 


293 


A JUNE WOMAN 

churlish nickum because he ignored her 
then ; because he had no more conscious- 
ness of her presence, or of Una’s, or of the 
June woman’s, than if they had been rocks 
— blank rocks — by the trail, as he flung 
himself on his knees beside his father. 

“Dad! Dadr^ he cried, his face as gray- 
blue with hurry as his baseball flannels. 
“Oh-h! Dad, what have you been doing 
to yourself — now 

“The biter bitten — Treff! Joker 
pinched!” came the answer in tones 
almost jocular, for the love in that boy- 
ish voice was a cordial. “Well! I guess 
I haven’t got my death-blow now you ’ve 
come. And — and the murder is out, 
boy : these little girls know all-11 : who 
you are — who I am !” 

Then, indeed. Jack at a Pinch raised 
his head and looked straight across into 
the blue eyes of Pemrose Lorry. 

“You must have thought me an awful 
"chuff’,” he said. 

“I’m sorry about the oars,” was the 


294 


PEMROSE LORRY 


mute reply of the girl’s eyes, but the least 
little tincture of a smile trickling down 
from her lip-corners, said: ‘‘But I’m 
glad I got even with you, somehow!” 

However, there was too much “getting 
even” just now in this wild spot — Life 
grimly settling accounts with the dragon 
who had so often “hazed” others — for 
the boy and girl to spend any more con- 
scious thoughts upon each other. 

There was the terrible trip — the worst 
mile ever traveled — down the Man 
Killer trail, for him, strapped to the 
stretcher, after the doctor had examined 
the injury and found the delicate knee- 
cap both slipped and broken. 

“ I guess if — if I pull through this, I ’ll 
be a — reformed — character ; no more 
— no more eccentricity for me,” he mur- 
mured dizzily to Pemrose who, when the 
trail permitted, walked beside him, strok- 
ing his hand, — and he rolled his eyes 
faintly, through the vail of the opiate 
which the doctor had given, at the knap- 


A JUNE WOMAN 295 

sack beside him, wherein lay the golden 

egg- 

And with his own hands, the Man Killer 
at last conquered, as they laid him in an 
ambulance, he took the five-inch, open- 
work steel box, the precious record, from 
that knapsack’s depth and handed it to 
her. 

She could not look at it, the little Thun- 
der Bird’s log of that two-hundred mile 
trip aloft, she could only jealously clasp 
it to her breast, — Toandoah’s little pal. 

“T-tell your fa-ther from — me,” said 
the broken voice, “that Treff Graham is 
the same old Treff; that he m-may be 
a pirate, but he isn’t a pig — not re-al-ly ! 
That,” faintly, “he apol-o-gizes — and 
steps aside ; that, with all his heart — 
it’s there, if it is a madcap—” wanderingly, 
winkingly, he touched his left breast “he 
hopes that, a year from now, the highways 
of the hea-vens may be opened — the 
im-mor-tal Thun-der Bird will fly ! 


CHAPTER XXIII 
The Celestial Climax 

A YEAR from then it did ! 

It awoke the World with its challeng- 
ing roar, silencing for ever, let us hope, 
the racket of guns upon this dear planet, 
leading man in future to seek his con- 
quests in more transcendent ways, even 
outside Earth’s atmosphere, as it took 
its pioneer flight again from the misty 
top of old Mount Greylock. 

The World and his wife were there to 
see : scientists from the four quarters 
of the globe — Earth’s great ones. 

And other spellbound spectators, too : 
Una, the White Birch Group, their Boy 
Scout comrades — Stud fast develop- 
ing into the type of hotspur who wanted 
to take passage for the moon — all massed 
in such a stupendous Get Together as 


THE CELESTIAL CLIMAX 297 

made the mountain seem “moonshine 
land”, indeed, to their thrill-shod feet. 

And never — oh ! never since the 
history of Mother Earth and her satellite 
began did such a spectacular traveler 
start on such a flaming trip as when the 
hand of a Camp Fire Girl of America 
threw the switch and the steel explorer, 
twenty feet long, leaped from its plat- 
form high into the air, pointed directly 
for the moon, with a great inventor’s 
mathematical precision, — trailing its two- 
hundred-foot, rosy trail of fire. 

There was not breath — not breath, 
even, to cry : “Watch it tear !” 

Only breath enough, in young girls’ 
bodies, at least, to gaze off at Mammy 
Moon, loved patron of many an outdoor 
revel, and ponder upon the nature of the 
shock she would get when the Thunder 
Bird’s last explosion lit up her fair face 
with a blue powder-flash — lit it up for 
earth to see ! 

“Do — do you think ’twill ev-er get 


PEMROSE LORRY 


298 

there — two hundred and thirty thou- 
sand miles, about, when — when an eighth 
of an inch out at the start ; and it would 
m-miss — miss?’’ breathed a youth who 
knelt by the heroine of the evening, the 
inventor’s daughter. 

‘‘Toandoah doesn’t miss. My father 
doesn’t miss.” The young head of Pern- 
rose Lorry queened it in the darkness, 
with a pride which made of old Greylock, 
at that moment, the world’s throne. 
“But how — how are we to live through 
the next hundred hours — the next four 
days — the time the Thunder Bird will 
take to travel ?” 

Yet they did succeed in living through 
it and in leading time a merry dance too, 
for young Treffrey Graham, junior, all 
old scores forgotten, was proving a prince 
of chums, as spirited in play as he was 
prompt in a pinch. 

And together — hand clasped in hand, 
indeed — by virtue of her being the in- 
ventor’s daughter, he the son of the man 


THE CELESTIAL CLIMAX 299 

who had resigned a fortune to the tran- 
scendent invention, side by side with two 
or three of those Very Great Ones, they 
stood, four nights later, looking through 
a monster telescope upon a mountain- 
top, and saw — saw the celestial climax, 
the first of the heavenly bodies reached. 

Saw the blue powder-flash light up the 
full, round face of the Silver Queen they 
loved, while the Thunder Bird, expiring, 
dropped its bones upon her dead surface. 

It ’s — got — there,’’ breathed the youth. 

What next ? Some day — some day, maybe, 
we ’ll be shooting off there — together 
^‘Yes! if only the Man in the Moon 
could shoot us back!” breathed Pemrose. 

Already it had come to be ‘‘we” bound 
up with “What next?” for it would, 
indeed, be a zero “next” in which the 
hands of youth and maiden would not 
meet in comradeship — and love. 

But the sun and center of the girl’s 
heart was still — and would be for long 
— her father. 


300 PEMROSE LORRY 

The greatest moment of that unprece- 
dented night came when Toandoah bent to 
her, and said : 

^‘Little Pern! there was just one mo- 
ment when I may have been discouraged, 
you remember ! None knew the Wise 
Woman who saved the city. ’’ 


/ 


























A story of the best type of home life, vnth a charming heroine. 


Then Came Caroline 


By LELA HORN RICHARDS 
With illustrations by M. L. Greer. 
12mo. Cloth 306 pages. 


Caroline was the fourth daughter in Doctor Ravenel’s family 
of five girls, — fourth on the list, but first in mischief, in ingenu- 
ity, in originality, in human sympathy and democracy. The 
father’s health made it necessary for the Ravenels to leave their 
old Southern home and migrate to Colorado. Here Caroline 
grew up — from ten to eighteen — her days full of interest, 
her courage, as the family struggled along under straightened 
circumstances, always unflagging. Sometimes the delight and 
sometimes the despair of her mother and her sisters, Caroline 
made friends in many quarters and met in unusual ways the many 
emergencies into which her impulsiveness led her. 

This is a splendid story of the best type of home life, and the 
four other girls — Leigh the unselfish, Alison the ambitious and 
self-seeking, Mayre the artistic and Hope the baby — complete 
a well-individualized group, alternately caressed and disciplined 
by old black “Mammy,” who had accompanied her “fam’bly” 
from Virginia. There are plenty of boys in the story too, likable 
lads, such as inevitably would gather around a group of whole- 
some and merry girls, ready for a game, a dance or any other 
frolic. Caroline will be a favorite with girl readers. They w ill 
enjoy the account of her running awayj her attempt to help her 
mother form a “social acquaintance” in their new home; her out- 
witting of Alison at the party; her early literary efforts; and the 
daring with which she “puts her finger” in nearly'everyone’s“pie.” 


LITTLE, BROWN & CO., Publishers 
34 Beacon Street, Boston 


A wholesome and diverting story of a girl mascot of the U. S. 
Marine Corps 


SERGEANT JANE 


By MARGARET MOORE MATLACK 
With illustrations by Nana French Bickford. 
12mo. Cloth. 278 pages. 


Sergeant Jane is the thirteen-year-old daughter of a Colonel 
of Marines, who is sent to command the Marine post at Char- 
lotte Amalia in the West Indies. Jane herself tells the story of 
her adventures, the escapades of her small brother Jimmy, and 
the — to her — absurdities of her sister, who has just reached 
the sentimental stage. Sergeant Jane is a breezy small person 
with a fondness for outdoor sports, a keen sense of humor and a 
deep pride in her father’s beloved marines. They in turn adopt 
her as their mascot; hence her title. In the course of the story 
Jane gives some very interesting pictures of the beautiful island, 
tJie charm of the life there, and the customs of the people. There 
is a good plot running through the pages, in which Jane has a 
chance to exercise her ingenuity, and a mystery which she is in- 
strumental in clearing up. 

“The finding of a good book for girls is a none too frequent 
occurence at the present time, or perhaps at any time. ‘Sergeant 
Jane’ is distinctly out of the ordinary, and it has many charac- 
teristics which should recommend it to immediate interest; .... 
the story is full of mystery and exciting incidents — both of which 
are likely to be lacking in the ordinary girls’ book,” — The Boston 
Transcript, 


LITTLE, BROWN & CO., Publishers 
34 BEACON Street, Boston 
















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